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"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Today's Stories

April 18, 2007

Landau / Hassen
Tancredo as 17th Century Indian Chief?

April 17, 2007

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
The Elections in France: a Coming Political Tsunami

Paul Craig Roberts
Bloodbath in Blacksburg

Frida Berrigan
Militarizing the Border

Alison Weir
The Message of PBS's "Crossroads" Series: Some Muslims Aren't Bad

John Walsh
Why is the Peace Movement Silent About AIPAC?

Jason Hribal
Resistance is Futile: Emily the Cow and Tyke the Elephant

Evelyn Pringle
The Iraq Money Trail

Ben Terrall
Cuban Exiles Get Hero's Welcome; Haitian Refugees Get Shafted

Stan Cox
1040s and Death Certificates

Soren Ambrose
Confidence Crisis at the IMF

Website of the Day
Go Ahead and Yell: "FIRE!"

 

April 16, 2007

John F. Sugg
Hate and Hypocrisy in the Cox Empire

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Escalating Military Spending: Income Redistribution in Disguise

Carl G. Estabrook
The Politics of the Useful Threat: It Didn't Start with the Neo-Cons

Paul Craig Roberts
The Party of Brownshirts

Uri Avnery
Blood on Our Hands

Ralph Nader
Where Are the Cries of Outrage Over Military Rapes?

Eamon McCann
Shame of the Empire: Simon, Sir Bono and Tinkerbelle

Lee Sustar
Decoding the Democrats

Mike Whitney
Trouble in Squanderville: Bubble People and the Faith-Based Market

Don Fitz
Solar Capitalism?

Stephen Lendman
Ecuador Votes for Revolutionary Change

Website of the Day
Black Mesa Water Coalition

 

April 14 / 15, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Ho Industry Whores

Jorge Mariscal
Gen. Petraeus's Field Manual: a Traveler's Guide to Big Muddy

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Beautiful and the Dammed: How the West Got Flooded

Dave Marsh
The Imus Affair, Hip Hop and Politics

Dr. Trudy Bond
Shrinks, Lies and Torture: How Psychologists Became the Pentagon's Bitches

Joe Bageant
A Feral Dog Howls in Harvard Yard

Fidel Castro
The Terrorist Walks

Alfredo Molano
"More Than Complicated"

Alan Farago
When Miami Crashes

Michael Neumann
Anglophone Fantasies and French Realities

Fred Gardner
Barbara McNair's Unsung Heroism: Bringing Down the Owner of EST

Ron Jacobs
A Conversation with Three Iraq Veterans Against the War

Gail Dines
Racy Sex, Sexy Racism

Linda Ford
Imus and Lady Hoopsters: a Long History of Bias Against Women Athletes

Missy Beattie
What Would Imus Do?: Iraq, Ho, Ho, Ho

Dan La Botz
Farm Labor Organizer Murdered in Mexico

Giuliana Sgrena
The Lies of Mario Lozano

Laura Carlsen
A Moratorium on Free Trade Agreements

Abu Spinoza
Wolfowitz's Real Crimes

Elizabeth Schulte
Grinding It Out with Quentin Tarantino

Poets' Basement
Davies, Harley, Engel and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Vonnegut's Final Interview

 

April 13, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Shattering of Mosul

Stephen Soldz
Aid and Comfort for Torturers: Psychology and Coercive Interrogations in Historical Perspective

George Ciccarriello-Maher
The Failed Chávez Coup: Five Years On

Laith al-Saud
Kirkuk, Oil and the Kurds

Dave Zirin
Memo to Imus

John Ross
Drawing a Line in the Heartland

Ramzy Baroud
America as Proxy

Harvey Wasserman
The Novelist Who Hated War: Peace Be With You, Mr. Vonnegut

Lopez, Olivo and Garcia
Columbia University's Two-Tiered Punishments

Dols, Fukumori, Judd and Tillett-Saks
Columbia: On the Wrong Side of Justice

Website of the Day
Democrats: an Iraq Scorecard

 

April 12, 2007

JoAnn Wypijewski
We May be Rid of Imus, But We're Still Stuck with the Culture

Paul Craig Roberts
Big Profits from Big Brother

Marjorie Cohn
U.S. Attorneys and Voting Rights

Evelyn Pringle
Bush Family War Profiteering: Will Congress Finally Cut Them Off?

Ron Jacobs
God Bless You, Mr. Vonnegut

Norman Solomon
The Awful Truth About Hillary, Barack and John

Joe DeRaymond
The Release of Dennis Counterman: The Justice Game, the Alford Plea and Death Row

Nicola Nasser
Squeezing Palestinians into an Impossible Mission

Nikolas Kozloff
Chile, a Country Geographically Located in South America "By Accident"

William S. Lind
Horatio Hornblower's Worst Nightmare

Siegfried L. Sassoon
A Statement Against the Continuation of the War

Website of the Day
Where You Want This Killin' Done?

 


April 11, 2007

R. T. Naylor
Quebec's Lessons for the US: How "Wars on Terror" Should be Fought

Vijay Prashad
The Generation of IEDs and iPods

Patrick Cockburn
The Myth of Tal Afar

Winslow T. Wheeler
When Will the War Money Really Run Out?

Jack Balkwill
Prison for a Peacemaker: A Vietnam Vet Interviews Kathy Kelly

Alan Farago
Florida's Fundamentally Weak Environmental Movement

Russell D. Hoffman
The Carbon Offset Tax is Just Another Nuke Bailout

Peter Rost, MD
The Fine Print on Drug Industry Kickbacks

Mike Whitney
Doomsday for the Greenback?

Dave Lindorff
Torture and Selective Outrage

Susie Day
Peter Pace Porks a Peck of Pinko Perverts

Website of the Day
Save the Internet!

 

April 10, 2007

James G. Abourezk
How Syria Helped the US in the "War on Terror"-and How Bush Said "Thanks"

Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Why Imus Should be Fired-And Why He Won't Be

Joshua Frank
Democrats for War

Lee Sustar
How Concessions by UAW Lost Jobs

Joseph Grosso
Tiger Woods in Dubai: Luxury and Exploitation

Nirmal Ghosh
China and the Fate of the Tiger

Robert Jensen
Impeach the System

Ramzy Baroud
Not an Intellectual Squabble

Paul Rockwell
History Will Vindicate Lt. Ehren Watada

Mario Joseph and
Brian Concannon

Solidaridad? Chávez in Haiti

Fred Wilhelms
Why the New Royalty Rates Hurt Artists

Website of the Day
Thaw!

 

April 9, 2007

Saul Landau
Whining Imperialists

Uri Avnery
Shalom, Shin Bet

Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Nightmare: an Interview with Nahla Al-Arian

Gideon Levy
Israel Does Not Want Peace

Corporate Crime Reporter
Big Coal Invokes Reverse Nuremberg Defense

Evelyn Pringle
The Surge in Casualties

Hill Kemp
Mega Lessons from Iraq War, Year 5

Martha Rosenberg
Monsanto's Desperate Plea: "Regulate Our Competitors!"

Keith Rosenthal
Behind Boston's Recent "Crime Wave"

Jane Stillwater
Green Zone Cabin Fever

Website of the Day
Support Norman Finkelstein


April 7 / 8, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Dead Dogs Don't Bleed: How Giuliani Lost America

Sara Roy
A Jewish Plea

Arno J. Mayer
Back to Cleopatra's Nose: Bush-Bashing and Empire's Onward March

Jeffrey St. Clair
In the Realm of the Grizzly Kings

Vicente Navarro
Why Huntington and Beck Are Wrong

Fidel Castro
Where Have All the Bees Gone? And Other Reflections on the Internationalizaton of Genocide

Fred Gardner
Medical News from the Business Pages

Ralph Nader
The IRS Owes You Money

David N. Rahni
Test Tube Zealots: American Chemical Society Purges Iranian Chemists

Arthur Neslen
When an Anti-Semite is Not an Anti-Semite

Pratyush Chandra
Joseph Stiglitz's "Another World"

Missy Beattie
Enough Already! The Politics of Exasperation

Marc Levy
A Beginner's Guide to Combat

Poets' Basement
Reiss, Holt, Orloski and Louise

Website of the Weekend
Reactor Man

 

April 6, 2007

Franklin Lamb
Why is Hezbollah on the Terrorism List?

Gloria La Riva
On the Case of the Cuban Five and Luis Posada Carriles

Corporate Crime Reporter
The Politics of Coal in West Virginia

Ron Jacobs
Good Friday, Beethoven and Patti Smith

Felice Pace
Simon Says: The Pro-Israel Bias of NPR

Walter Brasch
Treason in the White House?

David Swanson
Heroes, Sung and Unsung

Sylvia Syracuse
Roadside Rampage: Salvadoran Murders in Guatemala


April 5, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
A De Facto Hostage Exchange

Tom Barry
The Fred Thompson Factor

Richard W. Behan
Congressional Complicity

Nicola Nasser
Playing US Politics with Iraqi Blood for Oil

Bernadine Dohrn
The New and Old SDS: Convergence Not Division

Laray Polk
Lucky Dragon: Does the World Really Need a New H-Bomb?

Helen Redmond
Female Chauvinist Pigs?

 

April 4, 2007

Col. Dan Smith
"Have You No Sense of Decency?": the Tillman Affair and the Moral Decay of the Army

Joshua Frank
Democratic Blood Money: Sen. Feinstein's War Profiteering

Margaret Kimberly
Of Confessions and Torture

Sharon Smith
Circuit City's Guinea Pigs: the Latest Trend in Corporate America

Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

Martin Luther King,Jr.
Beyond Vietnam

Bill Quigley
Incident at Fort Huachuca, the Army's Torture Training Center

Dave Zirin
Picking Chicago's Pockets with the Olympics

Evelyn Pringle
Drug Companies Want Women of Childrearing Years

Peter Rost, MD
Pfizer's Puny Fine

Website of the Day
Crash of the Honey Bees

 

April 3, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
US's Bungled Plan to Kidnap Iran's Top Spook Prompted hostage Taking

Marjorie Cohn
Coming Up Short on Habeas Corpus for Gitmo Detainees

Brian M. Downing
The Army's Road to Iraq

Corporate Crime Reporter
Coddling Pfizer: Praise the Criminal, Dis the Whistleblower

Carol Norris
A Psychologist on Sexual Assault: Yes, Virginia, There is a Sollution

Ralph Nader
Tailpipe Blues

Dave Lindorff
I Quit: A Movement of One (Or a Maybe a Million)

Scott Bontz
The Great Depletion

Thomas Dolby
Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Racism and the National Anthem

Website of the Day
Cockburn on BookTV


April 2, 2007

Gary Leupp
A Bogus Hostage Crisis

Uri Avnery
Condi in the Middle East: Olmert and the Pussycat

James Petras
Palestine: The Political Economy of a Disaster

Norman Solomon
McCain in Baghdad: Walking in McNamara's Footsteps

Robert Fisk
War of Humiliation

Stanley Heller
A Neocon Looks Two Conquests Ahead: The Ravings of James Woolsey

Sherwood Ross
How the Pentagon Cheats Iraq Vets Out of Medical Care and Disability Pay

Monica Benderman
On Keeping Men Alive: Report from Ft. Stewart

Stephen Fleischman
Winners and Losers in a Dog-Eat-Dog System

Anne McElroy Dachel
Never Mind the Mercury

Website of the Day
Midwestern Common Sense on the War


March 31 / April 1, 2007

Cockburn / St. Clair
That Was an Antiwar Vote?

Fred Gardner
How Corrupt is Malcolm Gladwell? Shilling for Enron and Breast Cancer

Greg Moses
The Pirates of Homeland Security

Gary Leupp
300 vs. Iran (and Herodotus)

Robert Fisk
Shakespeare and War

Roger Morris
The Politics of the Witch Hunt

Conn Hallinan
The Price of Fire: Oil, Water and Resistance in Bolivia

Kristin J. Anderson
A Protocol for Death

Jason Hribal
California's Most Unhappy Cows

John Ross
Strange Fruit Down South

Christopher Brauchli
Bush and the Politics of Falsehoods: If You're Going to Lie, Lie Big

David Underhill
War Breeds Stranger Bedfellows

Elizabeth Schulte
The Pentagon's "Don't Ask" Disaster

Ben Terrall
Time for Lula to Stop Doing Bush's Dirty Work in Haiti

Missy Beattie
Guess Who Isn't Coming to Dinner: The Story of King Abdullah and the O-Word

Sonja Karkar
How Palestine Became Israel's Land

Daniel Wolff
Have You Heard the News?

David Vest
A Romanian Jazz Rebel Drops a Bomb on Paris

Ron Jacobs
Wynton Marsalis Checks In on the Land That Never Has Been Yet

Poets' Basement
Davies, Holt, Wigley and Landau

Website of the Weekend
Kansas City Rocks

 


March 30, 2007

Alan Maass
Oil and the Empire

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
A Memo on Iran: Brinksmanship in Uncharted Waters

Richard W. Behan
George Bush's Land Mine: If Iraqis Get Revenue Sharing, Exxon Gets Their Oil

Gabriel Kolko
Israel's Last Chance

William S. Lind
Operation Anabasis

Stedjan / Weis
The Cluster Bomb Treaty: Again, It's the US vs. the World

Kevin Zeese
Is Bush Lame or Is Congress?

David Busch
Homeless in LA

Fidel Castro
Biofuels and Global Hunger

CounterPunch News Service
Mistrial in Olympia 15 Case

Website of the Day
Free Shaquanda Cotton


March 29, 2007

Saul Landau
Comparing Padillas

Patrick Cockburn
When Iraqi Cops Go on a Rampage

Dave Lindorff
War and the Futures Market: Oil Traders Fear an Attack on Iran

Arthur Neslen
Normalizing Injustice: Jaffa's Ugly Truth

Michael Dickinson
Incident at Westminster Abbey

Ingmar Lee
Plantskyyd: Planting Trees with Pig's Blood in British Columbia

Aseem Shrivastava
As India Goes Global, the Public Goes Private

Marlene Martin
Sacco and Vanzetti, Revisited

Mahmoud El-Yousseph
Wake Up, You Live in America!

Michael Foley
A Citizen's Peace Lobby

Website of the Day
Impeach Bush Club Parade


March 28, 2007

Nicole Colson
The Ongoing Persecution of Sami Al-Arian

Harry Clark
Michigan Peaceworks on Palestine

Larry Everest
Another $100 Billion to Continue the War

Jonathan M. Feldman
Citigroup, Property and Theft

Dave Zirin
Yet Another Book on Muhammad Ali (and Why I Wrote It)

Jane Stillwater
How Runaway Inflation Has Slipped Under the Radar

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Pakistan's Cry for Justice

Jim Wilfong
Who Owns Maine's Water?

Hawra Karama
An Open Letter to Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi Uncle Tom

Website of the Day
Free Fire on Iraqi Civilians



March 27, 2007

Iain Boal /
Standard Schaefer
British Petroleum and the New Greenmail

Patrick Cockburn
The Hostage Game

Monica Benderman
On Ending War: Is America Ready for the Troops When They Come Home?

Corporate Crime Reporter
Political Players and Single Payer

Joshua Frank
Dems in Power: Broken Promises and Bald-Faced Lies

Harvey Wasserman
Will Al Gore Deliver Us to Solartopia?

Sen. Russell Feingold
FBI Abuses of the Patriot Act

Tillman Family
Crimes and Cover Ups are Not "Missteps"

Patrick Bond
Zimbabwe's Descent

David Judd
Arbitrary Discipline at Columbia

Website of the Day
Why Work?


March 26, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Seven Days on Iraq's Cruel Roads

Uri Avnery
Schoolbooks and Borders

Greg Moses
Hothouses for Hapless Masses on the Rio Grande

Bill Hatch
A Plague of Big Shots

John V. Walsh
The Democrats' War Funding Debacle

Diane Christian
God Does Not Love the Aggressor

Dan La Botz
The Immigration Movement at a Crossroads

Frederico Fuentes
Latin America Tells Bush to "Get Out!"

Sunsara Taylor
Democrats' Victory Means More Iraqi Deaths

Mickey Z.
Pat Tillman: Beyond the Hype

Website of the Day
DynCorp's Iraq Training Policy

 


March 24 / 25, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Where are the Laptop Bombardiers Now?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Nuclear Saviors?: Kyoto, Gore and the Atomic Lobby

David Rosen
An American Obituary: Anna Nicole Smith and the Exploitation of Nature

Ron Jacobs
The Political History of the Car Bomb

Robert Fantina
Vietnam and Iraq, the Rhetoric Remains the Same

Alan Maass
Why Ralph Nader Took a Stand

Atul Gawande
On Washing Hands: A Surgeon's Notes on How Infections Spread in Hospitals

Marianne McDonald
Staging Anti-Colonial Protest

China Hand
Zealots Scheme to Derail North Korea Accord

Kaz Dziamka
The Iroquois Way of Impeachment

Andrew Wimmer
The Nursemaid's Tale

Don Monkerud
World's Biggest Debtor Nation

Anthony Papa
Bong Hits 4 Jesus Case

Matthew Provonsha
Return of the Black Bloc

Missy Beattie
Calling Youth and Young Adults

Stephen Fleischman
Confrontation, At Last

Poets' Basement
Newberry, Laymon, Harley and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
An Interview with Ron Jacobs

Song of the Weekend
"Who Would Jesus Bomb?"


March 23, 2007

Saul Landau
Return to Syria

Patrick Cockburn
Welcome to Iraq, Mr. Ban

Greg Moses
Protesting Immigrant Prisons in the Rio Grande Valley

Rep. Ron Paul
The War Funding Bill

Franklin Lamb
Will Hezbollah Hand Israel Its 6th Defeat?

Stephen Gowans
Mugabe Gets the Milosevic Treatment

Roger Burbach
Leftist Victory in Ecuador

Dave Lindorff
The Gutless Mini-Politics of the Congressional Democrats

William S. Lind
Candles in the Hurricane

Alan Mammoser
The New Rules of Food

Russell Hoffman
Al Gore's Nose is Glowing

Website of the Day
Global Outsourcing and the US Working Class

 

March 22, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Oil-Rich Kirkuk at the Melting Point

Robin Blackburn
Toxic Waste in the Sub-Prime Market

Michael Donnelly
Mr. Green Goes to Washington: Another Oscar Performance from Al Gore

Uzma Aslam Khan
Down Pakistan's No-Constitution Avenue

Lee Sustar
Bush's Braceros: The Ugly Truth About the Guest Worker Program

Robert D. Skeels
LA's Vicious War on the Homeless

Rev. William Alberts
The Forbidden C-Word

Anne McElroy Dachel
The Search for the Elusive Autism Gene

Mickey Z.
This is Your Brain on Meat

Website of the Day
Raimondo Does Hitchens

 


March 21, 2007

Tao Ruspoli
A Conversation with Robbie Conal

James Petras
Meet the Global Ruling Class

Fred Gardner
A U.S. Army Pipe Dream

Corporate Crime Reporter
Cramer Comes Clean: Lies, Market Manipulation and Wall Street

Faisal Kutty
Too Guilty to Fly, Too Innocent to Charge?

Robert Fantina
U.S. Imperialism in Action

Isabella Kenfield and Roger Burbach
Brazilian Opposition to Bush-Lula Ethanol Accords

Lucinda Marshall
Missing in Action: Why is the Peace Movement Ignoring the Impact of War on Women?

Winslow Wheeler
Dem Budget Tricks: Reform Means What We Say It Means!

Website of the Day
Student Day of Action Against the War

 

 

March 20, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq is a Vast, Blood-Drenched Human Disaster

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Blank Check War

Sharon Smith
Hillary's Cojones: Our Bleached-Blond Thatcher?

Uri Avnery
The New Palestinian Unity Government

Stan Cox
Down-to-a-Trickle Economics

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Hating the Rich

Alan Farago
Why Al Gore Soft-Peddled the Environment in 2000

Richard W. Behan
Impeachment and Patriotism

Juan Antonio Montecino Latin America Has Moved On

David Krieger
The Treaty of Tlatelolco

Peter Rost, MD
An Open Letter to Pfizer's CEO: $11 Million Salary, 36% Raise, 10,000 Fired Employees

Mickey Z.
A Cat-Eat-Cat World: Beyond the Pet Food Recall

Website of the Day
Bringing the War Home

Webclip of the Day
Sunsara Taylor Beats O'Reilly, Again

 

March 19, 2007

Paul Craig Roberts
Crime Blotter: 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

Patrick Cockburn
Operation Deepening Nightmare

Stauber / Rampton
Why Won't MoveOn Move Forward?

Werther
Plame Wars: Valerie Plame, the Washington Post and the Ghost of Joe McCarthy

Noam Chomsky
In Memory of Tanya Reinhart

Jeff Leys
Tap Dancing on Graves: How Democrats Bought the War

Richard May
And Then There Were None: Europe's Afghan Backlash

Ron Jacobs
Lessons of the Antiwar Movement and the Washington Post's Lessons of the Iraq War

Mike Whitney
Rove in the Dock

Website of the Day
Ringtones That Roar

 

 

March 17 / 18, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Here Comes Another "Crime Wave"

John Scagliotti
A Sissy's Manifesto

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Green Imposter: When Al Gore Was Veep

Paul Craig Roberts
The Confession Backfired

Greg Moses
Jailing Immigrant Mothers in El Paso

Harry Clark
Thrice-Told Tales: Those Israel-Syria Peace Talks

Brian Cloughley
In the Name of Improving People's Lives: Mounting Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq

Mehran Ghassemi
An Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh on the US, Israel and Iran

William Loren Katz
A Disturbing Expulsion: Racism and the Cherokee Nation

John Ross
Being a Zapatista Where You Live

Ralph Nader
Ban the Bomblets!

Walter Brasch
An Intolerant Minority: the Witch Hunt Against Gays in the Military

Samer Assad
The Palestinian Unity Government: Another for US Diplomacy

Dave Zirin
Bowie Kuhn: Death of a Baseball Reactionary

Ron Jacobs
The Darker Nation's: Remembering and Re-examining the Third World

Missy Beattie
No to War and Pace

Don Santina
First, They Came for the Democrats

Sami Adwan
What Hillary Should Know About Palestinian Schoolbooks

Dr. Susan Block
Gods of Spring: the Erotics of the Equinox

Poets' Basement
Reed, Landau, Engel, Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
God Save Helen Mirren

 

March 16, 2007

R. T. Naylor
The Political Economy of Diamonds

Paul Craig Roberts
The Last Days of Constitutional Rule

Joshua Frank
Obama's Israel Problem

Diane Farsetta
How Reporters Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Nuclear Front Groups

Tom Barry
Tancredo's Putsch: Anti-Immigrant Agenda Veers Hard Right

Stephen Lendman
Plays from a Political Fake Book: Congress's Phony Opposition to War

Al Krebs
Compounding Infamy: Chiquita, Its Workers and Colombia's Death Squads

Jackie Corr
Senator Schumer and the Corruption Culture

Ramzy Baroud
Palestinians Must Redefine Struggle

Reza Fiyouzat
The Chinese Way of Capitalism

Website of the Day
Introducing: the iRak

 

March 15, 2007

Alison Weir
Strip-Searching Children at Israeli Checkpoints

Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad Under Surge

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Memo to Congressional Leaders on Iraq Funding: First Stop the Bleeding

Franklin Spinney
Of Character and Contractors: the Unauthorized Rumsfeld

Standard Schaefer
Biofuels and the Green Resistance

Conn Hallinan
The Right's Stuff in Africa: Neocons, Evangelicals and Sudan

Maureen Webb
Another Patriot Act Abuse

Sonja Karkar
Rachel Corrie and Palestine

Margaret Kimberly
The Profits of Self-Hatred: Malkin and D'Souza, Incorporated

Anthony Papa
The New Capones: It's Time to Rethink Drug Prohibition

Katherine Hancy Wheeler Bush's Latin American Tour: Good Will Lost

Video of the Day
The Easiest Targets

Website of the Day
Memo to Kucinich: Watch Your Back!

 

March 14, 2007

Tao Ruspoli
A Conversation with Peter Linebaugh on the Slave Trade, Magna Carta and the State of the Left

Philip Agee
The Decline of the US, the Rise of Latin America

Bruce Dixon
The Digital Redlining of African-Americans

John Walsh
How One Senator Could End the War

Sunsara Taylor
Red Light, Green Light: the Democrats and Iran

William Johnson
Still Reeling from Katrina: The Spirited Strike at Pascagoula Shipyards

Richard Thieme
Entitlement and Empire

Jeffrey Klein
Right-Wing Academic Values

Nicola Nasser
This Time, Israeli is Missing an Historic Opportunity

Dave Lindorff
Political Hide-and-Seek with the Democrats

Website of the Day
Oil Change

 

March 13, 2007

Catherine Wilkerson, M.D.
Scenes from a Cop Riot

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Invastion of Lebanon

Robert Bryce
Beyond Redemption: the Legacy of George the Second

Corporate Crime Reporter
Coal-Powered Democrats

Pierre Rimbert
Libération and the Evolution of French Neoliberalism

Dave Lindorff
What's Good for Halliburton is Good ... for Dubai

Elizabeth Schulte
The Repackaging of John Edwards

Norman Solomon
The Pragmatism of Prolonged War

Kevin Zeese
The Democrats' Fraudulent Iraq Exit Plan

Jeff Conant
Greeting Rumsfeld in Taos

Website of the Day
Tacoma and the Big Heat

 

 

March 12, 2007

Marjorie Cohn
Patriot Act Unbound

Col. Dan Smith
Ghost Prisoners, Shadowy Jails and Secret Trials

Paul Craig Roberts
Neocons in Kafkaland

Ingmar Lee
The Sentencing of Betty Krawczyk: a 78-Year-Old Eco-Heroine

Fred Gardner
Cannabis for the Wounded: Another Walter Reed Scandal

Ron Jacobs
Showdown at Port Tacoma: Confronting the War Machine in the Northwest

Ralph Nader
Send the Bush Twins to Iraq!

John Ross
Political Prisoners in Calderon's Mexico

Stephen Fleischman
Bush's Latin American Slip

Eva Carazo Vargas
Why We Reject CAFTA

Website of the Day
Mountain Justice Spring Break

 

March 9 / 11, 2007

Sameer Dossani
Interview with Noam Chomsky: War, Neoliberalism and Empire in the 21st Century

Jeffrey St. Clair
Crude Alliance: The Bi-Partisan Politics of Oil

Dave Marsh
Bono's Bullshit: Not One Red Cent

Patrick Cockburn
Shia Pilgrims Die Despite US Offensive

Jennifer Van Bergen
A Gonzo Argument: Alberto Gonzales's Defense of NSA Domestic Spying

James P. Stevenson
Pardon Whom? Libby and the Cheney Unseen

Arthur J. Versluis
Crusade for Commercialism

Corporate Crime Reporter
Not a Dime's Worth of Difference: Congress and Corporate Crime

Missy Beattie
Too Much Info, Newt!: Sex, God and Praying

Michael Simmons
Annie Get Your Gums: Why I Like Ann Coulter

Kevin Zeese
Making Democrats Pay the Price: Voting Against the War is No Longer Enough

David Swanson
Shocking Video: The Dark Side of the Democrats

John A. Murphy
Are the Congressional Democrats Spineless?

Dave Lindorff
Bush Dodges a Constitutional Bullet in New Mexico: Abetted by Democrats

Nikolas Kozloff
Lights! Camera! Chavez!

Christopher Fons
Bush Goes to Latin America: Is It All About (N)PR?

Mike Roselle
A Thousand Miles of Bad River

Mike Mejia
Justice for Sibel Edmonds

Susie Day
Anna Nicole Smith Bombs Iran!

Michael Donnelly
LA Story: Rock Stars, Porn Stars and Peace

Tao Ruspoli
Just Say Know (Parts 4 and 5)

Poets' Basement
Reed, Laymon, Mezmer and Harley

Website of the Weekend
Japanese Dolphin Massacre

 

March 8, 2007

Elaine Cassel
The Tragic Case of Jose Padilla

Yifat Susskind
Iraq's Other War: Violence Against Women Under US Occupation

Corporate Crime Reporter
Politics and the Prosecutors

Col. Dan Smith
The Sins of Walter Reed

William S. Lind
The Washington Dodgers

Mark Engler
Bush's Latin American Spring Break

Roger Burbach
With Negroponte as Tour Director, Bush's Trip Destined to Fail

Dana Cloud
Return of the Campus Witch Hunts: David Horowitz and the Thought Police

Isabella Kenfield
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April 18, 2007

Gold Digging

The U.S. Treasury Department's Economic Campaign Against North Korea

By CHINA HAND

Reality-based reporting is making a comeback on the matter of Banco Delta Asia -- fgthe little Macau bank with the frozen North Korean accounts that has held up execution of the Six Party Agreement for almost two months.

McClatchy's Kevin Hall is one of the few journalists who has followed this issue closely and critically. He recently posted two important articles on BDA.

As a result, a clearer picture is emerging of a concerted U.S. effort to exceed the scope and intent of U.N. sanctions by exploiting the domestic exigencies of the Patriot Act Section 311 anti-money laundering powers as a pretext for pursuing a worldwide economic blockade against North Korea.

Now the imperatives of the Patriot Act have collided with the demands of U.S. diplomacy over the issue of Banco Delta Asia. Diplomacy dictates that the BDA decision be overruled, but elements within the Bush administration are unwilling to surrender or curtail the investigatory and sanctioning power they enjoy under the Patriot Act for the sake of the Six Party Agreement.

The Bush administration's head might understand the superiority of the State Department's diplomatic approach to the North Korean (and Iranian) problems, but its heart is with the coercive anti-diplomacy of a faction within the Treasury Department.

Apparently unwilling to choose between one or another, the Bush administration has awkwardly attempted to split the difference and as a result its diplomacy in North Asia is thrown into confusion.

Now an unwelcome light is being cast both upon the use of Patriot Act Section 311 as a policy -- as opposed to a national security-tool, and on the role of the Treasury Department in exploiting, misrepresenting, and, quite possibly abusing the Act in turf struggles with realists in the State Department.

At the heart of the BDA matter is the Bush administration's fundamental conundrum in Asia-whether it should confront or conciliate China.

Hall's first article, Money laundering allegations by U.S. false, report says describes the (relatively) clean bill of health Ernst & Young gave to BDA in its audit, characterizing it as a legitimate bank doing legal business, albeit with weak internal controls, and debunks the counterfeit supernote moneylaundering canard.

The second article, Gold sales may have spurred Macau bank's blacklisting, posits that the real motive for the crackdown on BDA was to cut off North Korea's (legitimate) gold bullion sales, noting that BDA purchased and resold about $110 million of North Korean gold.

The significance of McClatchy's reporting is that it further undercuts the U.S. assertion that the BDA sanctions executed under Section 311 of the Patriot Act were independent Treasury efforts to protect U.S. currency from compromise by counterfeit currency and prevent terrorists from exploiting the world financial system--and should not, indeed can not, be subordinated to the exigencies of U.S. diplomacy.

However, cutting off bullion sales by the North Korean government was not part of the U.N.-approved international sanctions regime against Pyongyang's WMD industries; and it could not be construed as a legitimate pretext for sanctioning BDA under the Patriot Act.

Cutting off North Korean government sales of bullion looks like part of a campaign of economic blockade and financial warfare that goes beyond the targeted sanctions regime endorsed by the United Nations.

And using Patriot Act Section 311 as the means to shut down BDA's bullion purchases from North Korea looks less like a legitimate use of the Act to protect U.S. national security and more like an element in a campaign of coercion on behalf of a unilateral United States foreign policy-a secret policy that had regime change at its heart.

As to the question of how important BDA was to North Korea's gold bullion sales, I will admit to being an agnostic.

Gold is as good as...gold. People like it, especially when desperate sellers provide a discount, as North Korea probably does.

North Korean gold is probably not that hard to sell, even in the context of North Korea's rumored production of six tons per annum and in the face of a U.S. campaign to cut North Korea off from the world financial community.

What the United States has probably accomplished is simply to make it very difficult for North Korea to trade gold on the established international markets, and force it to dispose of the gold at a less desirable price.

As the Christian Science Monitor reported in January:

One indication of North Korea's need to sell gold was its decision to provide information needed by the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) to list the North's central bank as a "good deliverer" of gold and silver. Listing with the LBMA is essential for refiners who want to sell their products in London. The bank's listing was suspended 2-1/2 years ago when it failed to respond to LBMA requests for "proactive monitoring."

The LBMA said it does not "take into account any political criteria," and will keep the bank on its rolls for another three years without monitoring.

Despite the listing, market experts say the big banks that are major buyers of gold ­ and form the LBMA's core membership ­ are not likely to flout the spirit of the US Treasury order against Banco Delta Asia, through which North Korea exported gold prior to the ban.

"The fact that they're on the list does not mean they can deliver to the London market," says Stewart Murray, the LBMA's chief executive. "When we have sanctions, none of the facilities will accept delivery from a company or a country that is subject to these sanctions."

Of course, North Korean gold exports haven't been officially banned, so Murray's statement that, despite being listed as a "good deliverer", North Korea was not allowed to sell gold on the London market makes little sense except in the context of a U.S. campaign to discourage trade in North Korean gold on the London exchange, using either diplomatic pressure or the threat of some Treasury enforcement action.

Colin McAskill -- who purchased Daedong Credit Bank, the bank which has $6 million in funds tied up in BDA -- has been campaigning to make it possible for North Korean gold bullion and other metals to be sold freely on the international market, thereby making foreign investment in North Korea's gold and other metals and raw materials industries more feasible and attractive.

I wonder if McAskill's enthusiasm for bringing North Korea in from the cold on gold sales is a reason why the obviously legitimate and private character of his bank's account at BDA has been ignored by the champions of the free market and capitalism at the Treasury Department and, instead of being repatriated separately, his monies will disappear into Kim Jung Il's suitcase as part of the funds "resolution".

As befits its anonymous, fungible character, North Korean gold has found its way into the world market through other channels.

An interesting article by Bertil Lintner in Asia Times describes the growth of North Korean gold and silver sales to Thailand. Precious metal exports from North Korea to Thailand grew from virtually zero to $40 million in 2006.

Along the way, Lintner also documents the financial harassment of North Korea in Europe:

The action against Banco Delta Asia, a privately owned bank that the Macau government later had to prop up to prevent it from collapsing, was the second move against North Korea's assets abroad. In a much less publicized action, North Korea's only bank located in a foreign country - the Golden Star Bank in Vienna - was forced to suspend its operations in June 2004.

The Golden Star was 100% owned by the Korea Daesong Bank, a state enterprise headquartered in Pyongyang, and was allowed to set up a branch in the Austrian capital in 1982. For more than two decades, Austrian police kept a close eye on the bank, but there was no law that forbade the North Koreans from operating a bank in the country.

Nevertheless, Austria's police intelligence department stated in a 1997 report: "This bank [Golden Star] has been mentioned repeatedly in connection with everything from money-laundering and distribution of fake currency notes to involvement in the illegal trade in radioactive material."

Eventually the international pressure to close the bank became too strong. Sources in Vienna believe the US played an important behind-the-scenes role in finally shuttering Golden Star's modest office on 12 Kaiserstrasse in the Austrian capital. Until then, Vienna had been North Korea's center for financial transactions in Europe and the Middle East. Visitors to North Korea have noted that euro coins in circulation in the country - the US dollar is not welcome in Pyongyang - invariably came from Austria. (Euro notes are the same in all European Union countries, but coins designate individual member countries.)

Here's another data point, courtesy of Daily NK:

Singaporean newspaper "Singapore Lianhe Zaobao" reported, "Though the recent BDA issue ended in shambles, Macao and BDA did face some trials" and "With the U.S. able to strangle any county with international financial sanctions, the BDA issue rang alarm bells for illegal acts occurring throughout the world."

The Zaobao's online site reported on the 24th, "7~8 small scale family run banks in Macau banks are faced with the threat of closing down as BDA concluded that these banks were acting as North Korea's 'laundering black money.'

Macau has been caught in this political issue after being targeted as a place dealing North Korea's money laundering." The newspaper also analyzed that the international community had questioned China's morals [emphasis added].

China's morals are probably not the issue here.

China's insistence on following the letter of the UN sanctions and not the broad interpretation favored by the United States is probably at the nub of it all.

China is North Korea's largest trading partner. It can purchase exportable North Korean outputs for its own use or even repackage and re-export them.

It can pay for North Korean exports using foreign exchange, let North Korea hold the funds in a Chinese bank, and permit North Korean companies to use those funds to open letters of credits for imports.

Its jewelry industry can easily absorb North Korea's bullion-or, if desirable, resmelt it into clean, pretty bars-without reference to any de facto sanctions by the London exchange.

Therefore, China is the weak link in any U.S.-led financial blockade of China.

And we all know, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

Which means that an effective financial blockade of North Korea had to include an effective China component-something which is apparently lacking.

Unfortunately, diplomacy was apparently not part of the Bush administration skill set, and the big stick was trundled out to threaten China with dire consequences if it didn't participate in the unilateral U.S. sanctions regime.

As David Asher-the State Department's previous pointman for the North Korean effort at State -- acknowledged in a recent interview, the ultimate target of Treasury's investigations in Macau was China.

In comparison with Banco Delta Asia, the information that had been collected on evidence of money laundering by the Macao branch of the Bank of China was "voluminous," Asher said.

Asher insists that the move against Banco Delta Asia was the direct consequence of law enforcement efforts and was not designed as political leverage in talks that were taking place simultaneously with North Korea on nuclear disarmament.

He advocates that efforts to curtail North Korea's links to criminal activity, and to ensure that China joins the enforcement effort, should not be suspended for the sake of expediency in the disarmament talks in Beijing.

"Banco Delta may be a sacrificial lamb in some people's minds, but it is not about Banco Delta," he said. "It's about Macao, Macao's government, China, the Chinese government and their complicity and their accommodative behavior toward North Korea's illegal activities, proliferation activities and leadership financial activities." (Donald Greenlees and David Lague, How a U.S. inquiry held up the N. Korea peace talks, International Heritage Tribune, April 11, 2007)

It looks like Treasury took the provocative step of threatening Bank of China with a money laundering tag in a failed attempt to get Macau and its patron Beijing to fall into line on America's unilateral sanctions initiative against North Korea.

The threats apparently persisted even after the so-called March 14 resolution of the BDA funds-the Treasury Department's scorched-earth final decision denouncing BDA. After the decision was announced, Daniel Glaser went to Macau and presented the results of the Treasury investigation to the Macau authorities in an effort to persuade them not to release some of the BDA funds.

Reading between the lines, Glaser probably declared that Treasury's campaign against purported laundering of North Korean funds by Macau banks would not be suspended unless Macau obeyed Treasury's diktat concerning the BDA funds.

My hypothesis is when Macau didn't respond with appropriate enthusiasm, Glaser injudiciously escalated the confrontation by promising further investigation of mom-and-pop banks in Macau, possibly an indictment of BDA's directors for being knowing conspirators (something that was bruited about in the Macau press) and, most unwisely, threatened to make it known that Treasury considered Bank of China Macau to be implicated in the North Korean money laundering web.

This kind of threat against the reputation and viability of Bank of China Macau is the best explanation I can come up with for China's remarkably harsh and pointed subsequent summons to Treasury.

On March 21, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated:

In an effort to safeguard the financial stability in the Macao Special Administrative Region (MSAR), China yesterday demanded the US consult and negotiate with the MSAR government to address the latter's concerns over the issue of Banco Delta Asia (BDA), a Macao-based bank.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao made the remarks at a regular press conference commenting on the frozen capital of North Korea at BDA. ... He urged the US to negotiate with the MSAR government on the issue to maintain Macao's financial and social stability.

Nothing here about greasing the wheels for the Six Party Agreement. Or doing the right thing by a little bank that got caught in the middle of superpower diplomacy.

China's talking about the "financial and social stability" of Macau.

That probably means Bank of China Macau.

So Daniel Glaser was called back for what appears to have been ten days of stonewalling during which he refused to lift the threats against Bank of China Macau and other banks handling North Korean money or gold.

His line of defense -- in his discussions with perhaps his most determined opponent, the State Department -- probably hinged on the fact that Patriot Act 311 enforcement had been sold as an independent U.S. enforcement initiative unrelated to whatever U.N. sanction or Six Party diplomatic process involving North Korea.

If the sanctions against BDA were removed explicitly to facilitate the Six Party Agreement, then the legitimacy of Patriot Act Section 311 investigations-and their intimidating aura of implacable, inexorable malice -- would be lost.

And Daniel Glaser and his boss, Stuart Levey, would look like jerks who had been using the pretext of supposed U.S. law enforcement obligations to promote a secret, unilateral, destabilizing North Korea policy under false pretenses.

Which, in my opinion, is exactly what they did.

And now I think the world-and Beijing--knows it.

Which means the credibility of Patriot Act Section 311 investigations is shot. European banks (and governments) leery of the U.S. approach on North Korea and Iran will find it easier to opt out of an explicitly politicized Section 311 investigation and sanctions regime.

And obtaining explicit waiver from Section 311 investigations will emerge as a central theme in trade negotiations between China and the United States (whose team will be led by Levey and Glaser's boss, Treasury Secretary Paulson).

Nevertheless, Levey and Glaser probably insisted to President Bush that the club of Section 311, exploiting the central position of the United States in the world financial system and shielded from international and U.S. law under the national security aegis, was too powerful a weapon to repudiate for the sake of the Six Party Agreement (indeed, this is an assertion that Glaser and Asher and their advocates have been making with suspicious frequency in public fora).

And perhaps President Bush, himself a big fan of coercive middle-finger unilateralism, backed them, in effect splitting the baby, letting State pursue engagement and Treasury continue with confrontation.

Maybe it was the Chinese and the State Department who blinked, in effect throwing up their hands, ginning up a workaround, proceeding with the Six Party Agreement, and leaving the question of what to do about Patriot Act initiatives against Chinese banks-and the issue of the Treasury Department's refractory attitude--for Secretary Paulson's upcoming China trade talks.

Given the general contempt for North Korea and the credulity and sloppiness of most Western reporting on this subject, the only reason that we know or care that the Treasury Department is out to screw the North Koreans no matter what is the embarrassment and chaos its intransigence has brought to American diplomacy.

But now, thanks to the saga of the $25 million that somehow could not make it out of Macau, the narrative emerging from the BDA mess is not of the threat from North Korean supernotes, contraband, or WMDs.

It's a picture of a U.S. campaign of economic warfare against North Korea, a campaign which may have registered successes in cutting off access U.S. financial institutions, intimidating European banks, ostracizing North Korea from the London gold exchange, and twisting the arm of the Macau monetary authority to stop BDA and possibly other Macau banks from selling Kim Jung Il's gold.

And it's the disturbing picture of a campaign that went too far, stalled and become meaningless except as an unnecessary irritant to China, a crucial world power, because the United States lacked the political will and international support to initiate a high-stakes confrontation with North Korea's powerful protector over a little country with a little bomb.

Even more disturbing, it's a picture of a campaign that has been so extensive, so prolonged, so demanding of our allies, so insistent and coercive upon international financial institutions, and so central to American prestige and credibility that we are unable to abandon it and move beyond a campaign of harassment against a tiny bank in Macau-and provocation directed against a country that is central to the United States' economic and fiscal well-being.

But the true story is not one of confusion, contradiction, and mixed messages in U.S. policy.

The story is one of American shortsightedness.

If North Korea wants to be insulated from the international financial community, all it needs to do is hide behind China's coattails.

But that's not what it wants.

North Korea wants to achieve international legitimacy and access to world financial markets. It wants to export directly, attract foreign investment, raise capital on the international financial markets, and sell its gold on the world exchanges.

North Korea doesn't want to grovel to the Chinese and sell energy, resources, and gold to Beijing at below-market prices.

Quite the opposite.

Returning from North Korea, Bill Richardson noted:

Interestingly, North Korea sees themselves eventually as an ally of the United States; in other words, as an ally against China. They see themselves as playing a strategic role as a buffer between the United States and China.

Every American comes back from North Korea with the same message.

North Korea wants to break free of Chinese domination and align itself with the United States.

And what do we do?

Every time the North Korean dog sticks its head out of its Chinese kennel, we beat it on the snout with a stick-and force it back to the heel of its Chinese master.

And we persist with the policy even when it runs counter to our current diplomatic efforts and security strategy for the region.

It's a policy that's blind, self-defeating, and futile.

And now that the U.S. has abandoned a policy of confrontation with North Korea, it's also become ridiculous.

China Hand edits the very interesting website China Matters.




 

 

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