Today's Stories

February 16, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reconstruction: the Greatest Fraud in US History?

February 13 - 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Rocks

Joshua Frank
The Myth of Clean Coal

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Coming Out Party

George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela's Term Limits: More Hypocrisy From the NYT

Nikolas Kozloff
Venezuela Beyond the Referendum

Brian M. Downing
Pakistan on the Brink

Paul Craig Roberts
Deficit Nonchalance

Christopher Ketcham
Israel's Ball Boys

Ron Jacobs
At a Campus Sit-In Against Israeli Occupation

Dave Lindorff
Why Can Judd Gregg See What Obama Can't?

Alan Maass
Lincoln at 200

Chuck Spinney
Grassley Sounds Off on Obama's Man at the Pentagon

Phil Gasper
Mr. Darwin's Reluctant Revolution

Stephen Lendman
A Short History of Business Handouts

Charles Thomson
Tate Cruises: Caveat Emptor on the High Seas

Kathy Sanborn
The Suicide Rush

Saul Landau
Bowled Over

Len Wengraf
The Nightmare in Somalia

Harvey Wasserman
Striking a Blow Against Nuclear Power

David Macaray
An Easy Call for Obama on Joining a Union

Tom Stephens
Four Freedoms, Four Changes

Seth Sandronsky
Lincoln and the Collective Mind

David Yearsley
On the Road Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Freaking Out With Danny Barnes

Kim Nicolini
The Body of the Worker: What "The Wrestler" Says About the State of America

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Buknatski and French

Website of the Weekend
The Iranian Revoution and the US Dual Containment Policy: a Presentation

February 12, 2009

P. Sainath
Neo-Liberal Terrorism in India: The Largest Wave of Suicides in History

Jean Bricmont
French Echoes of the Israeli-Palestine Conflict

Michael Hudson
Trying to Revive the Bubble Economy: Obama's Awful Financial Recovery Plan

Peter Lee
Pakistan, Not Afghanistan, is the Main Event

Dave Lindorff
Judges Nabbed, Jailing Kids for Kickbacks

February 11, 2009

Neve Gordon
Few Peacemakers in the New Israeli Knesset

Peter Morici
Anatomy of a Hemorrhage

Andy Worthington
Who's Running Guantánamo?

Marjorie Cohn
A Call to End All Renditions

Fred Gardner
Change We Can Smoke?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The G & O (Geithner and Obama) Bank

Zoe Blunt
Vancouver Island Hippies: Top Security Threat for 2010?

Belén Fernández
Politics on the Panamericana

Martha Rosenberg
Don't Breathe the Meat

Website of the Day
George Dyson on Project Orion

Blues of the Day
David Vest on the CBC

February 10, 2009

Kathy Kelly
How Do People Keep Going?

Nikolas Kozloff
The Stimulus Imbroglio

Uri Avnery
Dirty Socks

Michael J. Berg
Will South Carolina be the Center of the Nuclear Revival?

Russell Mokhiber
Et Tu, Atul?

Joe Bageant
A Commodity Called Misery

Gareth Porter
Petraeus' Subterfuge

Dave Lindorff
Seek Truth, But Prosecute Liars

Rannie Amiri
The Implications of Recognizing Israel's "Right to Exist"

Harvey Wasserman
Nukes and the Stimulus

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What We Didn't Learn at Obama's Press Conference

Website of the Day
RIAA Takes Over DoJ Under Obama

February 9, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Why Sanjay Gupta is the Wrong Man for Top US Health Job

Paul Craig Roberts
Driving Over the Cliff

Julio Sanchez /
Feliz de Bedout
The Threat of Peace in Colombia: an Interview with Hollman Morris

National Lawyers Guild
Strong Indications of Israeli War Crimes

Jonathan Cook
Israeli University Welcomes "War Crimes" Colonel

Alana Smith
The Nightmarish Case of Fahad Hashmi

Binoy Kampmark
Taking the Bong

Sam Bahour
End the Occupation First

Nicole Colson
Can You Afford College?

Ron Jacobs
Remembering the Second Intifada

Website of the Day
The Legacy of Ed Grothus and the Black Hole

February 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's First Bad Week

Ishmael Reed
Saint Thelma's Book

James Abourezk
Obama, Mitchell and the Palestinians

William Blum
Obama and the Empire

Patrick Cockburn
Maliki's Triumph

Henry A. Giroux
Educating Obama

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Darwin's Living Legacy

Mouin Rabbani
A New Low on Gaza?

David Yearsley
Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Springsteen!

Saul Landau
The Wrestler: an American Tragedy

Jules Rabin
Israel's Disproportionate Responses

Raymond J. Lawrence
A Country Awash in Money But Going Broke

Janette Habel
Castro's Socialism in Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Economy on a Thread

Missy Beattie
Blackout at the Gaza Zoo Massacre

Dale Gieringer
The Opium Exclusion Act of 1909: Marking 100 Years of Failed Drug Prohibition

John Ross
Davos vs. Belem; Swine vs. Pearls

Richard Rhames
Jobs is a Four Letter Word

Bob Wing
Obama, Race and the Future of U.S. Politics

Robert Bryce
Corn Dog Update: Another Study Exposes Bio-Fuel Scam

David Macaray
AFL-CIO and Change to Win in "Re-Wed" Talks

James L. Secor
Inaugural Questions Nobody Asks: Notes from Kuala Lumpur

Jason Flom /
Anthony Papa
The Scourging of Michael Phelps

Norm Kent
Ten Reasons to Get High About Pot in 2009

Kim Nicolini
When Utopia Crumbles: Why Revolutionary Road was Shut Out of the Oscars

Lorenzo Wolff
Ridiculous Flow: How Cee Lo Green Sells Soul

Poets' Basement
Emily Dickinson (with Commentary by Daniel Wolff)

Website of the Weekend
S.J. Gould: Darwin's Untimely Burial

February 5, 2009

Michael Mandel
Self-Defense Against Peace

Saul Landau /
Philip Brenner
Killing the Monroe Doctrine

Ralph Nader
Tax the Speculators!

Robert Bryce
The Unraveling of the Ethanol Scam

Russell Mokhiber
Occupied Territory

Sameh Habeeb /
Janet Zimmerman
Innocents Lost

Dave Lindorff
Small Change

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Beyond Green Capitalism

George Ochenski
A Blow to Big Coal in Montana

Website of the Day
Putting CEO Pay in Context

February 4, 2009

Arno J. Mayer
On Corruption

Paul Craig Roberts
The War on Terror is a Hoax

Patrick Cockburn
The Iraqi Elections

Jonathan Cook
An IDF Jihad?

Fred Gardner
Obama's Mixed Messages on Marijuana

Stan Cox
Slumwrecking Millionaires: India's Fragile New Temples

Margaret Kimberley
The Deepening Economic Crisis

Lawrence Velvel
Agony & Desperation: Madoff's Victims

Dave Lindorff
A Generals' Revolt?

Doug Giebel
A Helping of Bitter Beltway Baloney

Serge Quadruppani
Student Protests Sweep Italy

Website of the Day
The San Francisco 8

February 3, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency & Anthropology: Roberto Gonzalez on Human Terrain Systems

Bill Moyers
Obama's Wars: an Interview with Pierre Sprey and Marilyn Young

Kirkpatrick Sale
Obama's Lincoln Thing

Conn Hallinan
When Mind Wounds Don't Count

Peter Morici
The Slippery Slope of Stimulus

George Ciccariello-Maher
From Oakland to Santa Rita: "Fired Up, Can't Take It No More"

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
The BBC's Nadir

Allan Nairn
What Does It Take to Get a Meal Here, an Earthquake?

Norman Solomon
Why are We Still at War?

David Macaray
The Late, Great UAW

Website of the Day
The Bloody Cove

February 2, 2009

Uri Avnery
Under the Black Flag: Israeli War Crimes

Ralph Nader
What to Do About Wall Street

Gareth Porter
Generals Move to Obstruct Obama's Iraq Withdrawal Orders

Paul Craig Roberts
The Death of American Leadership

Harvey Wasserman
The Nuclear Industry's Latest Money Grab

Rannie Amiri
Gaza and the Crimes of Mubarak

Cal Winslow
Stern's Gang Seizes UHW Union Hall

Steve Early
Checking Out of Stern's Hotel California

Alan Farago
Superbowl as Panopticon

Diane Farsetta
Banning Domestic Propaganda

January 30 / February 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama and the Oddsmakers

Michael Hudson
Obama's New Bank Giveaway

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
"Too Big to Fail:" a Bailout Hoax

Dave Lindorff
The Ugly Truth: the American Economy is Not Coming Back

Saul Landau
Freedom Fighters, Terrorists or Schlemiels?

Andy Worthington
Blame the Chef: How Cooking for the Taliban Can Get You Life in Gitmo

Subcomandante Marcos
Gaza Will Survive

Robert Jensen
Future Farming: an Interview with Wes Jackson

Ron Jacobs
Return of the Democrats

Gareth Porter
Is Gates Undermining Another Opening to Iran?

Allan Nairn
Hope for the Dump Cities?

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA's Dangerous Security Agenda

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Feelings of a Stranger

Christopher Brauchli
From Gitmo to Supermax?

Jules Rabin
Israel and the Bomb

Col. Dan Smith
Thoughts From an Inauguration Refugee

Missy Beattie
The US Garden of Evil

Tom Barry
Obama's Immigration Challenge

J. Michael Cole
The Downfall of an Academic

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Burning the First Amendment

Dan Bacher
How Dam Removal Can Save the Klamath River

David Rosen
Last Gasp of the Culture Wars?

Don Monkerud
Religion in the American Bedroom

Binoy Kampmark
Updike: Apostle of the Middlebrows

Lorenzo Wolff
Playing Down a Bad Reputation: the Lovin' Spooful's Near Perfect Record

David Yearsley
When Orfeo and Euridice Lived Happily Ever After in Upstate New York

Poets' Basement
Valentine and Rihn

January 29, 2009

Peter Linebaugh
Tom Paine's Birthday

Paul Craig Roberts
Is It Time to Bail Out of America?

Riz Khan
The Future of Gaza: an Interview with Jimmy Carter

M. Reza Pirbhai
Pakistan: a New Cambodia?

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Al-Arabiya Interview

Gregory Vickrey
What About the Environment? Cap and Trade and Selling Out

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
Whither the Two State Solution?

Alison Weir
Killing Palestinians Doesn't Count: Fact-Checking Ceasefire Breaches

Alan Farago
Economy Without Escape Routes

Walter Brasch
Taxing a House of Cards

Website of the Day
Madoff Inc.

January 28, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
Behind the Bloodbath in Gaza

Noam Chomsky
Obama's Emerging Policies on Israel, Iraq and the Economic Crisis

Patrick Cockburn
Is Mitchell's Mission Already Doomed?

Rob Larson
The Clinton Foundation Donors

George Wuerthner
Who Will Speak for the Forests?

Allan Nairn
South-East Asian Groups Threaten Retaliation Over Gaza Invasion

M. Junaid
Levesque-Alam
A Muslim's Memo to Obama

Stefan Simanowitz
The Silent Trade

Charles R. Larson
The Autumn of the Patriot

Website of the Day
Veggie Love: PETA's Banned Superbowl Ad

January 27, 2009

Winslow T. Wheeler
Save the Economy by Cutting the Defense Budget

Yigal Bronner /
Neve Gordon
Fueling the Cycle of Hate

Joshua Frank
Obama's Neocon: the Curious Case of Richard Holbrooke

Jordan Flaherty
Torture at a Louisiana Prison

Ralph Nader
Access to Economic Justice

Rev. José M. Tirado
How Iceland Fell: a Hundred Days of (Muted) Rage

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Looking Forward

Russell Mokhiber
What If Israel Were in Your Neighborhood?

Martha Rosenberg
Who Says Technology Transfer Doesn't Pay?

C. G. Estabrook
The Inaugural Address: the Digested Read

Website of the Day
Who Profits From the Occupation?

January 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Speaking the Truth is a Career-Ending Event

Deepak Tripathi
The BBC's Day of Shame

Vijay Prashad
The India Lobby: Drunk with the Sight of Power

Peter Lee
Geithner's Pop Gun Volley at China

Allan Nairn
The Torture Ban That Doesn't Ban Torture

Uri Avnery
On the Wrong Side of History

John Sayen
The Next Shoe to Drop

Dave Lindorff
Afghanistan is No Threat to America

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff

David Macaray
Obama vs. Labor

Roger Burbach
Winds of Change in Cuba

Norman Solomon
The Ghost of LBJ

Website of the Day
Landscapes of Occupation

January 23 / 25, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Ghosts at Obama's Side

P. Sainath
The Freefalling Economy

Patrick Cockburn
In Israel, Detachment From Reality is the Norm

Saul Landau
Reasons for War?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Our Current Economic Crisis: the Monks' Cure

Alan Farago
The Problem with the Stimulus

Christopher Brauchli
When Due Diligence is a One-Way Street

Andy Worthington
Return to Law?

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pentagon: Bowing to the Masters of War?

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Four)

Henry A. Giroux
The Audacity of Educated Hope

David Yearsley
The Music That Wasn't There: Chamber Music for Obama's Masses

Raymond F. Gustavson
Here We Go Again: General Shinseki and Veterans

Dave Lindorff
The Way Forward

Roberto Rodriguez
Fighting for Migrant Justice in the Desert

Dina Jadallah-Taschler
The Struggle of an Un-People

Fidel Castro
Meeting Cristina

J. Michael Cole
Can Obama's Shift on Terror Succeed?

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
It's Time to Free Leonard Peltier

Ramzy Baroud
Breaking Gaza's Will

Mohammad Ali Shabani
The Aftermath of the War on Gaza

Richard Rhames
Panning for Pyrite on a Cold Day at the Mall

Stephen Martin
Voices in the Mirror

Lorenzo Wolff
Jurassic Radio

Kim Nicolini
Katrina's Endless Loop

Poets' Basement
Fleming, Henson, First, Jaramillo and Glendinning

Website of the Weekend
Cartoon Love

January 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Another Real Estate Crisis is About to Hit

Kathy Kelly
Worse Than an Earthquake

Allan Nairn
US Intel Nominee Lied About Church Murders

Lawrence Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience (Part Three)

Andy Worthington
Halting the Gitmo Trials

Peter Morici
How to Fix the Banks

Joseph G. Davis
The First MBA Presidency and the Business Academy: a Damage Assessment

Adriana Kojeve
The Democrats on Israel: a Brief Oral History

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Poised for Historic Vote

Website of the Day
Support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program

January 21, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Understanding Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Work Ethic

Michael Colby
Ready. Aim. Organize.

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Madoff: My Experience

Audrey Stewart
Starting Over in Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Obama and the Muslims

Binoy Kampmark
The Marketing of Hope

David Kεr Thomson
Abolition

John Ross
In My Own Bones

Allan Nairn
Killer in Chief: Will This President Murder Civilians?

Sheldon Richman
The Peaceful Transfer of Violent Power

Website of the Day
Globistan

January 20, 2009

Chuck Spinney
Hosing Obama Israeli Style

Kathy Kelly
The Strongest Weapon of All

Raymond Deane
The EU, Gaza and the Lisbon Treaty

Ralph Nader
State Terrorism Against Gaza

Audrey Stewart
Why I am in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Doctrine of Destruction

Harvey Wasserman
A Ten-Point Solar Agenda for Obama

Christopher Ketcham
Inauguration Ad Nauseam

Robert Jensen
A Citizen's Oath of Office

Dave Lindorff
Commie Chorus on the Mall: This Land Really is Made for You and Me

David Macaray
SAG Watches It All Slip Away

February 16, 2009

Uribe Para Rato

The Truth About Colombia's New Emperor

By OSCAR GUARDIOLA-RIVERA

'We’re at war here’, said Luis, as we sat to share a coffee in one of Colombia’s most prestigious Law Schools. ‘Any talk of peace plays into the hands of the terrorists’, he developed. ‘It’s a lie and a distraction. You know they had their chance during the previous administration, and they wasted it. They don’t want peace. They want time to regroup and organize. Democratic security hit them hard. Now they say peace and human rights. Whoever listens to them now is naïve, or a collaborator’.

Luis’s message is clear and shared by many, perhaps the majority of Colombians: you don’t talk to terrorists; you hit them harder and keep hitting them until you knock them down. Peace talk, humanitarian agreements and so on are a dangerous distraction. It gives them time to breath. It follows that if you insist on talking about peace, if you are prepared to give the enemy a voice, any chance to prove that they are anything other than inhuman, no matter how good your intentions may be the fact is you take their side. This was the logic rehearsed by Colombian President Álvaro Uribe Vélez on Friday February 6th, when he publicly accused the tiny minority of Colombians who dare to disagree, of being ‘the intellectual bloc of the FARC guerrillas’. Without mentioning names, he said these intellectuals deliberately pretend that ‘democratic security’ achieves nothing. ‘These people keep talking about human rights all the time, just to frighten our soldiers and policemen’, he said. ‘The intellectual bloc of the FARC guerrillas goes to Europe and the United States and says: “Be careful! Uribe is Paramilitary. Do not approve his Free Trade Agreement. Uribe is Parmilitary and a human rights violator!”. But the intellectual bloc of the FARC guerrillas hit their heads against a wall of facts, because this is the government that has given back to Colombians their trust and confidence’, he added.

Clearly, not to all Colombians. A minority they may be, but a relentless one … and quite influential. It was thanks to them that earlier last week FARC decided unilaterally to free six people, among them policemen and politicians who had been in their power long before Mr Uribe became the sole purveyor of solid facts, unwavering confidence, and all other things sacred to his adoring Colombian fans. These policemen and representatives, systematically forgotten by administration after administration, including the present one, or remembered and abused every now and then for electoral purposes or during public acts of chest-beating, mass rallies that amount to no more than a huge collective act-out, were freed thanks to the decision of this minority of Colombians to reclaim their voice and use it. All they did was to address publicly and directly the FARC guerrillas through a series of letters, challenging the government’s pretend monopoly over the means to manage the conflict.

Make no mistake, these are no FARC sympathizers. Their letters contained the harshest criticism of FARC’s kidnapping practices and an absolute refusal to accept the idea that the cause of the people could be advanced through such means, or that they could be justified in any way by a self-appointed vanguard of the people. They speak of peace, but they are no naïve pacifists either. Their call for peace is militant, and their act makes explicit an absolute refusal to accept the government’s position that it is the sole holder of the means to deal with the conflict. In that sense, they reclaim force as their own.

By ‘means’, then, understand the means of force: languages and bodies. That is, the flesh and blood individuals who have suffered and continue to suffer because of the ongoing conflict and fight back: the kidnapped policemen and politicians, the 17 indigenous allegedly killed by FARC early this week, but also the body of Edwin Legarda Vasquez, husband of Ayda Quilcué, one of the organizers of the unarmed indigenous upraising that paralyzed the main routes of southern Colombia in December last year, shot dead by the Colombian army. For this minority of Colombians, about 25,000 of them now known as ‘Colombians for Peace’, these bodies and voices are also their own, rather than mere means to an end and the object of government’s or anybody else’s monopoly.

Furthermore, their position entails the acknowledgment that the government’s intent is, precisely, to ‘manage’ the conflict rather than solve it, and that this position is untenable and insufficient. In that respect, ‘Colombians for Peace’ challenge not only the government’s pretend monopoly over the means to deal with the conflict; their most significant challenge is to add an understanding about Colombia’s conflict that goes beyond the different and competing languages and perspectives. Put otherwise, they speak a truth about the conflict that extends over the different languages and bodies involved. They ask: ‘what does it mean to manage the conflict rather than solve it?’

Surprisingly, the answer to this riddle, this ‘public secret’, was revealed by Alan Jara, one of the politicians liberated last week. During the first press conference after his liberation, Jara declared that Uribe is convenient for the guerrillas because his stance generates crisis and creates divisions among Colombians, while the guerrillas are convenient for Uribe because without them, how could he accuse and stigmatize the minority that scares him so much? How could he turn human rights activists and scholars, journalists, members of the opposition, scientists, feminist leaders, and pretty much everyone who dares to disagree, by a sleight of hand, into terrorists? To ‘manage’ the conflict rather than to solve it means that the two parties have come to realize that their political existence and persistence depends on the existence and persistence of the other, and this in spite of or perhaps because of their loud protestations to the contrary, their alleged will to annihilate the opponent. Jara’s crucial suggestion is that the warriors continue to fight not because of their irreconcilable differences but rather because they are now too much alike. Without FARC there would be no need for ‘democratic security’, no need for the Uribistas’ extreme brand of right-wing politics, and hence no need for Uribe; and without Uribe, FARC has nothing left to justify its failure as a revolutionary vanguard.

In this sense, the fact that FARC has been around for such a long time is not a testimony to their endurance and tenacity but the opposite: since the true aim of a revolutionary group is to disappear and be replaced by the popular block it supposedly has helped to organize, its endurance as a purely militaristic unit (with all the consequences that follow from long-term involvement in the maintenance of an army of considerable size, with a hierarchical structure, and some measure of territorial control) testifies to its inability to carry the revolution to the end, its loss of political nerve. Conversely, the fact that successive Colombian governments always claim to be on the brink of recovering their ‘sovereignty’ over the entire territory, but at best this only means that some more or less well-off city dwellers can actually go to their fincas or countryhouses during the weekend, or drive to the Caribbean coast at the end of the year as part of a caravana, a motorcade led by armored tanquetas and heavy military presence on the main roads, entails that in the best of cases governments have the illusion, not the substance of empire.

This is the truth that ‘Colombians for Peace’ have dared to state. Ditto for the journalists Hollman Morris and Daniel Samper, suring and after last week’s liberations. In a Gaza-style attempt to stop any journalists from actually doing their job, Uribe’s government ordered a cordon sanitaire around the theatre of operations. And a theatre it was; since government provided neither the initiative (this belongs to ‘Colombians for Peace’, among them persecuted Senator Piedad Córdoba) nor the effective means (put forth by the International Red Cross and the government of Brazil), it collaborated as best it could. It provided the theatrics, the appearance of control, in the form of a military ring around the area, a secretive attitude towards journalists, and Air Force presence above 20,000 feet. In the process, as denounced by journalist Daniel Samper, it almost derailed the entire agreement, perhaps willingly; it also created the conditions that endangered the life of Radio France International correspondent Hollman Morris, a name already well-known to the authorities. Morris was inside the zone already, daring to give voice to the different actors of the conflict for a History Channel documentary. He does this, unlike most other journalists in the country, by actually going to the theatre of operations, with all the risks this implies, depending on his microphone and his camera rather than on a government’s press release.

Apparently, this is already bad enough. On top of that, he happened to be in the place where the liberations where going to occur, together with journalist Camilo Raigozo, of the left-wing weekly Voz. Whether he was there because he was given the coordinates, in which case he would be more intelligent than the government’s Intelligence, or just by coincidence, as he insists was the case, is irrelevant. What is relevant is to understand that his presence threatened the government’s attempt to monopolize and manage the information. He challenged the government’s pretend ‘control’ over the languages and bodies involved in Colombia’s long lasting conflict, FARC’s not entirely dissimilar gesture. In short, his real ‘crime’ was having disrupted the theatrics of the proceedings, based on secrecy and manufactured consent, thereby revealing the actual impotence of the parties.

These journalists, and ‘Colombians for Peace’, behave somewhat like the child in the fable about the Emperor’s New Clothes. They add truth, and the truth they add is threatening to power. But this isn’t the usual case of dissenters speaking truth to power; those in power and their sympathizers, allegedly a majority of Colombians, now converge in the protection of public secrecy. Rather, it is by refusing to participate in the theatrical montage of a war without end supporting the illusion of sovereignty and empire that they allow in a subversive truth: an emperor with no clothes on the one side, an armed force with no political teeth on the other. How then can we explain the prolonged duration of the conflict? How then to explain the intensification of the conflict? To find an answer we must listen to what the victims themselves say, Alan Jara for instance, whose statement was immediately dismissed by Uribe’s government as an example of Stockholm’s Syndrome.

With them, we shall conclude that what really threatens Uribe’s party, as much as the other party, is the actual possibility of an end to the conflict, since the absence of ‘their’ conflict would mean that they would have to start to think politically, that is to say, in terms of how to make the revolution a realistic project and what that could possibly mean, or else, to advance the progressive agenda contained in and announced in the Colombian constitution that Uribe has sworn twice to protect, but has somehow managed to sidestep with impunity not once but many times, in the name of ‘democratic security’. The latter is the name for the all-or-nothing war policy at the heart of government’s discourse –a policy that in its few moments of clarity seems reminiscent of Carl Schmitt’s doctrine of the katechon: the ‘decider’ who in the state of emergency replaces the Legislative and the Judiciary in defining what passes as the law, under the pretext of the defense of the realm against all sorts of harbingers of the end of days.

Americans got a taste of what that means under Bush Jr., and what a bad taste it was. They have now rejected it irrevocably. Colombians, on the other hand, seem intent on having Uribe para rato; at least for as long as he, ‘and there‘s no other but Him’, as my friend Luis would say, can stop the end of days from happening. Uribe is ready to change the Colombian constitution once more, and/or allow one of his appointees to rule for a while in order to guarantee the continuity of ‘democratic security’; the point is to keep up the appearance of democracy amidst fears of potentially apocalyptic threats, not its form and substance. A Sovereign gesture, as the crown jurist of the Third Reich would surely point out.  However, as Walter Benjamin observed while debating Schmitt, what the Sovereign decider really fears is not the coming of the catastrophe he himself announces in order to remain in power and seek its deferment. What the Sovereign fears is last judgment, pronounced, in this case, by a minority of Colombians whose persistent defiance, in the face of real threats against their lives, remains a source of hope and inspiration.

Oscar Guardiola-Rivera lectures on international law and human rights at Birkbeck College, University of London. He sits at the Steering Board of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. He is the author of Being Against the World: Rebellion and Constitution (2008).

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