Today's Stories

July 26 / 27, 2008

Joseph Nevins
Death as a Way of Life on the Borderlands

July 25, 2008

Harvey Wasserman
NRC: New Nukes Not Ready for Prime Time

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for the Facts About Israel?

Alan Farago
Where's the Outrage?

Paul D'Amato
The Arrest of Radovan Karadzic and the Selective Prosecution of War Crimes

Gary Leupp
War With Iran? State Dept. Realists vs. Cheney's Ultras

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Eyes Wide Shut in India

Mike Whitney
Obama Dazzles Old Europe, While McCain Cries, "No Mas!"

Paul Krassner
Inside Camp Mogul

Mike Roselle
All Hail Nero!

Website of the Day
Pressing Starbucks

July 24, 2008

Greg Moses
Who Killed Azem Hajdari?

Andy Worthington
Folly and Injustice: Salim Hamdan's Guantanamo Trial

James Bovard
Daniel Ellsberg's Lessons for Our Time

Joe Bageant
Life in the Post-Political Age

George Wuerthner
Boondoggle in the Fields

DC Larson
Shutting Out Ralph Nader

William Willers
The Forest Products Industry in Public Education

David Macaray
On the Prospects for a SAG Strike

Website of the Day
Pacifica Radio Archive of 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago

July 23, 2008

Winslow T. Wheeler
An Air Force in Free Fall

Paul Craig Roberts
The Mother of All Messes

Ralph Nader
Pavlov's America

Mike Whitney
Visualizing Dow 6,000

Susie Day
Senator Sicko: Jesse Helms and the Theatre of the Depraved

Website of the Day
"A Kinder and Gentler Machine-Gun Hand..."

July 22, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Ten Years On, Bolivarian Revolution at Crossroads

Patrick Cockburn
Boost for Obama Over Iraq Withdrawal

Soldz, Olson, Reisner Arrigo and Welch
Torture After Dark

Moshe Adler
Everyone Must Share, Not Just Charlie Rangel

Martha Rosenberg
Protecting Bones from Drugs that Protect Bones

Dan Bacher
Bechtel and the Big Dig

Harvey Wasserman
Is Gore Inching Toward Solartopia?

Anthony Papa
A Slugger's Drug Redemption

Binoy Kampmark
Mad Over Benedict

Website of the Day
Hiroshima: A-Bombed Objects

July 21, 2008

Ishmael Reed
Remnick's Latest Blunder

Mike Whitney
The Democrats are the Real Problem

Andy Worthington
Dictatorial Powers Upheld: the Meaning of the Al-Marri Decision

Scott Pellegrino
Should "Meet the Press" Desegregate?

John Ross
McCain Crosses the Border, Gets No Satisfaction

Robert Weitzel
Blowback Through the Looking Glass

Mike Stark
I was Spied on by the Maryland Police

Website of the Day
Pinky Solves the Illegal Immigration Crisis

July 19 / 20, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
It's a Dull Race

Jeffrey St. Clair
How to Beat a Mining Company: Why a Gold Goliath Threw in the Towel

Dave Lindorff
I Was a Victim of the TSA

Saul Landau
Obits for Opposites: Carlin and Helms

Ron Jacobs
Why Afghanistan is Not the Good War

Uri Avnery
Different Planet:the Israel / Hezbollah Prisoner Swap

Neve Gordon
The Untold Story of Ni'lin

Roane Carey
Dr. Benny and Mr. Morris

Robert Fantina
Ashcroft, Torture and the U. S.

Christopher Brauchli
The General Lied

Fred Gardner
Cannabinoid Researchers Won’t Take the High Road

David Macaray
Labor Unions and the Courts

Richard L. Hutto
The Ecology of Severely Burned Forests

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Mother's Milk of Politics Turns Sour

Ronnie Cummins
Netroots Nation or Nation of Sheep?

David Yearsley
Opera and Globalization

Alison McKenna
A Close Call for Medicare

Wajahat Ali
The Dark Knight Ascends

Poets' Basement
Ko Un

Website of the Day
What If Edward Said Had Told This Joke?

July 18, 2008

Corey D. B. Walker
A Kinder, Gentler Imperialism?

Mike Whitney
Swan Song for Fanny Mae

Robert Bryce
Iran Rising

Mike Roselle
Ed's Chicken: Fighting King Coal in Appalachia

Bouthaina Shaaban
U. S. to Mandela: Happy 90th and You're No Longer a Terrorist

Eve Spangler
The Deaths of Children

Website of the Day
Lowbagger Needs Your Help

July 17, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Airport Gestapo

James G. Abourezk
Big Oil's Raid on the Great Plains

Ralph Nader
D. C. Socialists Save Crashing Capitalists

Allan J. Lichtman
Conservative Denial

Andy Worthington"Screwed Up" and"Abused": Omar Khadr's Interrogations at Gitmo

Ronnie Cummins
Move Over MoveOn

July 16, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
Star Whores: How John McCain Doomed Mt. Graham

Paul Craig Roberts
War Crimes Paradox

Conn Hallinan
To the Edge in the Middle East

Dave Lindorff
Torture for Torturers?

William S. Lind
Running the Narrows in Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
Sweepstakes Politics

Website of the Day
History of Iraqi Art

July 15, 2008

Michael Hudson
Why the Bail Out of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae is Bad Economic Policy

Brian Cloughley
Iran's Missile Tests

Patrick Cockburn
Sadr's Militia May Live to Fight Another Day

John Ross
Crunchtime for Mexico's Oil

Howard Lisnoff
When Torture Was Practiced on U. S. Soil

Website of the Day
Rachel Corrie Soccer Tournament

July 14, 2008

Uri Avnery
Will Israel and / or the US Attack Iran?

Paul Craig Roberts
Enabling Tyranny

Trish Schuh
Talking to Iran's Only Jewish Member of Parliament: an Interview with Morris Motamed

Patrick Cockburn
Immunity in Iraq

Mike Whitney
Betancourt Unbound

Alan Farago
Will Miami's Cubans Vote Blue?

Seth Sandronsky
Taxing U. S. Stocks and Bonds

Phyllis Pollack
Stones Paint It Black

Website of the Day
Our Pal in Butte, Jackie Corr, RIP

July 12 / 13, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Lock and Load--It's the Law!

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Origins of the Western Greens

James Abourezk
Talking World War III Blues: From Dylan to Iran

Nicole Colson
The Ethanol Scam

Stan Cox
Fixing a Broken Agriculture

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Is There an Oil Shortage?

Wajahat Ali /
Omid Safi
The Future of Iran: an Interview with Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi

John Stauber
There May be a Left, But is it Moving? An Interview with David Sirota

Alan Farago
The Crash of the King of Liquidity

Missy Beattie
Dark Neighborhoods

Robert Fantina
Bush's Last Yes Man: Canada, Guantanamo and Yankee Poodles

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak Hires the Mosque

Gregory Kafoury
After the Obama Betrayal

Fran Shor
The Audacity of Hype

Martha Rosenberg
Why Heifer International is Rolling in Dung

David Macaray
Will There be an Actors Strike?

Andrew Wimmer
No Lies! No War!

Ron Jacobs
They Call Me the Seeker

Farzana Versey
The Kashmir Chiaroscuro

Kim Nicolini
Angelina Jolie's Wanted: Taking the M-Fers Down with Guns and Exploding Rats

Poets' Basement
Wright, Fleming, Solomon and Birnbaum

Website of the Weekend
Parsing Jesse Ventura

July 11, 2008

Kevin Alexander Gray
Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

Sasan Fayazmanesh
Historical Amnesia and the Shoot Down of Iran Air Flight 655

Peter Morici
Breaking Down the Trade Deficit

Mike Whitney
Worse Than McCain?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Oiling the War Machine

Robert Weissman
Crime, Punishment and ExxonMobil

Ramzy Baroud
The Not-So-Historic Barak-Talabani Handshake

Kelly Overton
If There is a Chimp Heaven

Adrian Burgos
In Praise of Jules Tygiel

Website of the Day
Wendell Berry on Mountaintop Removal

July 10, 2008

Brian McKenna
McCain's Melanoma Cover-Up

Paul Craig Roberts
Watching Greed Murder the Economy

Saul Landau
Mississippi River Blues

Ron Jacobs
Who Will Leave Iraq First?

Joshua Frank
Cutting Deals with Big Timber's Darth Vader

Peter Morici
What's Driving the Wall Street Rout

Alan Maass
Jesse Helms Finally Does the Right Thing

Robert Weissman
Humanitarian Failure at the G8

William Blum
Dr. Strangelove

Alan Farago
Coral Reef Meltdown

Website of the Day
Lieberman Must Go!

July 9, 2008

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Are They Really Oil Wars?

Luis Rodriguez
The Deadly Fallout from Gang Injunctions

Sheldon Richman
What's Wrong with Selling Your Vote?

Fatemeh Keshavarz
Lessons from Sa'di of Shiraz on"Enhanced Interrogation Techniques"

Chad Hanson
Blowing Smoke: Logging Industry Lies on Forest Fires and Climate Change

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Problems with the FISA Bill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Defining Deviancy Down with FISA

Dave Lindorff
Paul Krugman's Blind Spot

Stanley Heller
A Damned Good Assembly

Philip Rizk
Sick at the Gaza Crossing

Website of the Day
Mumia on Nader

July 8, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Riding the Colombia Gravy Train

Laura Carlsen
North America Doesn't Exist: the New Geography of Trade

Mike Whitney
Bush's Rampage in Somalia

Andy Worthington
Scandal at Diego Garcia

Patrick Irelan
The Empire Goes to the Movies

Chellis Glendinning
The Un-tied States of America

David Macaray
A Union Story

Dave Lindorff
Mumia's Long-Shot Appeal

John Chuckman
The Myths of Independence Day

Phillip Doe
FISA and the Decline of America

Website of the Day
Daniel Ellsberg on Warrantless Wiretap Bill

July 7, 2008

Patrick Bond
Can Reparations for Apartheid Profits be Won in US Courts?

Kathy Kelly
Cold Shoulders

Andy Worthington
Repatriation as Russian Roulette

Clifton Ross
A Rescue Staged for the Screen

Elizabeth Schulte
Obama's War Room

Ralph Nader
The Patriotism of Deeds

Dave Lindorff
Keeping Count

Binoy Kampmark
The World According to Jesse Helms

Stephen Fleischman
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Change

Website of the Day
Time for a Change

July 5 / 6, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Could Anyone be"Worse" Than Bush?

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Preliminary Notes from No Man's Land

Patrick Cockburn
Blowback from a Strike on Iran

Mike Whitney
Hunkering Down in Afghanistan with Field Marshall Obama

Robert Fantina
Obama, Iraq and Change

Binoy Kampmark
The Anwar Case: Snitching and Sodomizing

Rannie Amiri
Can Nasrallah Unite Lebanon?

Eric Ruder
Hidden Casualties

Brian Cloughley
Israel Flexes Its Muscles

William Blum
Some Thoughts on Patriotism

Frank Barat
The One-Word Solution

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Phony Pollution Accounting

David Yearsley
Rubbert Shines, as US Envoy Puts Foot in His Mouth

Ron Jacobs
U. S. Blues

Karim Makdisi
On Soccer and Politics in Lebanon

Wendy Thompson /
Chris Kutalik
What Can We Learn from the American Axle Strike?

N. D. Jayaprakash
The NPT as a Roadblock to Disarmament

Ramzy Baroud
Journalistic Imperatives

Kelly Overton
Animal Rights and Obama

Richard Neville
Bitch Fights and Tomorrow's Top Model

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Gibbons, Matson and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
Ginsberg and Cassady on"Extremists"

July 4, 2008

Kathy Kelly
Istiklal

Dave Lindorff
My War Story

Paul Krassner
Confessions of a Barista

Jackie Corr
In the Footsteps of Evel Knievel: Obama Heads Back to Butte

Laray Polk
Military-Industrial Convergence

Dan Bacher
Dead Runs: Salmon Fishing Banned in Central Valley Rivers

Walter Brasch
The Rocket's Red Glare--May be Chinese

Charles Modiano
Hall of Fame Hypocrisy

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Independence Day

July 3, 2008

Sharon Smith
Exxon's Legal Guardians

Andy Worthington
Another Torture Victim Gets Charged

Laura Carlsen
NAFTA and the Elephant in the Room

Peter Morici
Crisis Grips the Jobs Market

Ramzi Kysia
Breaking Into a Prison

Martha Rosenberg
Mandatory School Milk and the Early Death of Football Players

Anne Landman
Who Really Benefits From Voluntary Codes of Corporate Conduct?

Dave Zirin
Grand Theft Hoops

Kristin Bricker
US Contractor Leads Torture Training in Mexico

Website of the Day
Bush Tours America to Survey Damage from His Presidency

July 2, 2008

Patrick Irelan
Holy Obama

Vijay Prashad
Lunch with Karzai

Brian Cloughley
Sense of Honor, French and US Style

Ralph Nader
Economic Domino Theory

Robert Fantina
General Stupidity: McCain, Obama and Clark

Dave Lindorff
What's So Special About Veterans?

Parvez Ahmed
Obama and Those Pesky Muslim Rumors

Robert Bryce
The Democrats and Off-Shore Drilling

Website of the Day
King Corn: Q&A

July 1, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Two Months Later, Seymour Hersh Strains to Catch Up With CounterPunch

Mike Whitney
Getting to the Heart of America's Economic Crisis: an Interview with Michael Hudson

Douglas Macgregor
Obama's General?

Steven Higgs
Fighting the NAFTA Super-Highway

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo as Alice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
The Global Seed Police

Dave Lindorff
Blood Money Democrats

Roger Burbach
Fighting Food Fascism

Richard W. Behan
The Story Behind George Bush's Lies

Gary Leupp
The McCain Edge Among Voters on Iraq

Website of the Day
Mountaintop Removal and the Fight for Coalfield Justice

Weekend Edition
July 26 / 27, 2008

The Politics of Alaskan Oil Spills

Rockin' the Pipeline

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

This is an excerpt from Jeffrey St. Clair's new environmental history, Born Under a Bad Sky, now available from AK Press / CounterPunch Books.

It was the biggest quake to hit North America this century, a 7.9 jolt centered beneath the tundra about eighty miles south of Fairbanks that tickled seismographs all the way to New Orleans.

The trembler, on November 4, 2002, opened zigzag fissures in the earth, mangled roads, crushed a few remote cabins, triggered landslides, and cracked concrete from Fairbanks to Anchorage.

The Denali Fault appears to be awakening from a relatively long slumber. The fault, which curves through the Canadian Yukon through the Alaska Range past Mt. McKinley in Denali National Park, is the longest in the US where plates move horizontally, with land to the north slipping east and land to the south sliding west. It’s a violent mix.

Two weeks before the big shake, a 6.7 quake rocked an area just south of the epicenter of the latest quake. “They’re a very interesting pair of earthquakes,” said Roger Hansen, a seismologist at the Earthquake Information Center in Fairbanks. “One began and unzipped in one direction, and the second just unzipped the fault in the other.” For more than a month, hundreds of aftershocks continued to pulse across Alaska, some as powerful as 5.7.

Still, for all the rumbling, only one person was injured, a seventy-six-year-old woman from Mentasa Lake who broke her arm when she fell down the stairs of her home.

But the Denali quake did shake the foundations of the TransAlaska Pipeline. The pipeline, which carries about a million barrels of oil a day, was shut down hours after the quake and remained closed for days.

In its 800-mile trek from the belching ruin of Prudhoe Bay to the tanker ship terminals of Valdez, the pipeline crosses eighty rivers and streams, three mountain ranges, and it dips under coves, ponds, and marshes. The oil courses through the line at 140 degrees. A rupture would spill steaming crude oil onto some of the most ecologically frail lands in the world, and by comparison, make the Exxon Valdez spill seem like an oil stain on a driveway.

The pipeline is managed by the Alyeska Corporation, a consortium of the oil companies that exploit the reserves of the North Slope: BP, Phillips Petroleum, Exxon Mobil, Williams, Unocal and Amerada Hess. For the past twenty-five years, Alyeska’s flacks have maintained that the pipeline is invulnerable to natural disasters.

But hours after the quake throttled the Alaskan interior, reports came that several of the H-shaped brackets that hold the forty-eight-inch pipeline off the ground had buckled and broken. Engineers have identified ten severely damaged supports, including two consecutive ones near the point where the pipeline crosses the Denali Fault.

The foulest fantasies of Dick Cheney and his cohorts to extract the rest of the North Slope’s reserves may well rest on those frail and battered supports. Oil production at Prudhoe Bay is declining. Thus the oil companies are anxious to extend their domain west into the National Petroleum reserve, east into Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and north into the Beaufort Sea. All of that oil would have to be sluiced down the pipeline to Valdez.

One of the biggest questions concerns the valves in the underground sections of the pipeline, long considered the most likely point for a catastrophic breach during a quake. Aleyska says it sent “sniffer probes” down tubes to check the valves. But most engineers say those probes are of limited value.

There was enormous pressure from the oil companies to get the pipeline back in operation. Quickly. It’s estimated that more than $25 million worth of crude flows through the pipeline every day.

With this much at stake, no one could count on Alyeska to tell the truth about the damage to the pipeline. This is a company with a history of lies, known to abuse employees who have tried to tell the truth about problems with the pipeline in the past.

Richard Acord was a safety inspector on the pipeline. Back in 1991, he witnessed what has become a fairly typical occurrence. At Milepost 113.6, the pipeline dips below ground for one of twenty-five animal crossings, allowing caribou and other migrating animals to cross the pipeline corridor. A giant drilling rig, weighing more than 60,000 pounds, tried to cross over the buried line on wooden planks, slid off and sunk in the mud directly above the pipeline. The truck’s oil line broke, spilling diesel fuel onto the tundra. Acord tried to issue a stop-work order to ensure that the pipeline itself had not been damaged in the accident and to develop a plan to extract the rig without further damage to fouled tundra. The drilling crew’s supervisor chastised Acord and told him that he would either play ball or “they would find someone who would.”

“We had oil running down the tundra,” Acord stated in a deposition about the event. “We had a rig stuck across the pipeline, indeterminate material in the ground. All of those constitute a bad situation.” After going public, Acord was fired.

Acord was not alone. In 1994, four other safety inspectors settled a whistleblower lawsuit with Alyeska, claiming, among other things, that the pipeline company blacklisted them from other jobs in the oil industry after they raised complaints about worker safety and environmental practices.

Take the case of Charles Hammel. Back in the late 1980s, pipeline workers and inspectors began feeding Hammel information about problems with the pipeline and with Alyeska’s reckless cost-cutting and mismanagement. Hammel, an independent oil broker, took these concerns to congress and Alyeska was forced to spend millions of dollars to repair corrosion along the line.

The company, and the oil corporations behind it, didn’t like this one bit, so they went after Hammel with a vengeance. In 1990, they hired the Wackenhut Corporation to dig up dirt on Hammel. They rummaged through his trash, ran credit reports on him, set up a fake enviro group to trick him into giving them information, and even hired a prostitute to try to seduce him. Hammel sued the company for invasion of privacy and won a $5 million settlement.

But that didn’t stop Alyeska. When whistleblowers raised concerns to management or went public, they were fired. After one inspector got subpoenaed to testify before congress, his manager told him that he’d “break his fucking arm” if he said anything to damage the company.

When auditors from the BLM and other outfits began to look at Alyeska’s books, the company’s managers were caught “file stuffing”—adding post-dated documents to make the thin records look more robust. When one employee refused to go along, his manager threatened to fire him on the spot. In fact, Alyeska was so brazen in its intimidation tactics that it even spied on California Congressman George Miller, then chairman of the House Interior Committee.

Alyeska has plenty to cover up. A series of audits since 1990 have disclosed thousands of code violations. The company’s maps don’t accurately depict the location of the pipeline. In one instance, Alyeska’s maps showed the pipeline being more than a mile away from its real location.

The fact is, the pipeline already leaks and has since nearly the beginning. The leaks are getting worse and more frequent as the pipeline ages. Between 1979 and 1993, the pipeline averaged about two shutdown incidents a year. Since then, the rate has increased to more than eight per year. In 2001, a twenty-one-inch shift in a section of pipeline at Atigun Pass went undetected by Alyeska for several months. This is oil spillage as normalcy.

As the problems get worse, Alyeska becomes more and more stingy, cutting costs at every turn. Since 1998, the company has cut manned stations along the pipeline from eleven down to four. That lack of oversight led to oil spraying undetected from the pipeline for more than thirty-six hours after a couple of drunks shot holes into it—also showing terrorists how easy it could be to turn the Alaskan tundra into a frozen facsimile of the Kuwaiti oil fields following Saddam’s retreat.

None of this fazed the Bush administration, which moved swiftly to reauthorize the pipeline for thirty more years of service.

“You can’t help but think about your physical safety when you are costing somebody $500 million,” said one Alyeska whistleblower. “The theory is that they will use the equipment until the line is destroyed. When you step back and look at the big picture, God, it stinks.”

Of course, one more twitch from the uneasy depths of Denali could bring it all crashing down.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont