Today's Stories

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

January 12, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Our Collapsing Economy

Mike Whitney
Israel's Moral and Political Insanity

Ewa Jasiewicz
Oh, Quiet Night: Only Six Homes Were Bombed

Bill Quigley
A Day in Gaza

Dave Lindorff
From Vietnam to Gaza

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Blowback From a Tragic Error: a Message to Barack Obama

Jonathan Cook
Israel Ponders the Third Stage

Andy Worthington
Seven Years of Guantánamo

Kara N. Tina
Oakland on Fire

Brenda Norrell
Palestinians and American Indians: Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

Nour Kharma
A Plea From a Teen in Gaza: "Will I Die, Too?"

Website of the Day
The Villages Group: an Antiwar Alliance in Sderot

January 9/11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Israel's Onslaught on Gaza: Criminal, for Sure; But Also Stupid

Kathy Kelly
Tunnel Vision: Report from Arish, Egypt

Bill Quigley
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

Elaine C. Hagopian
Gaza: History Matters

Mike Roselle
Drowning in a Toxic River: What Can be Done to Save Appalachia?

Steve Hendricks
The Torturer-Elect?

Gary Leupp
Revisiting the Tale of Samson

Jonathan Cook
Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Karim Makdisi
The Ceasefire Plan: the UN Finally Acts, But Does It Mean Anything?

Rannie Amiri
Livni's Big Lie

Peter Morici
In the Jaws of a Depression

Peter Montague
Can Chemicals be Regulated?

Ralph Nader
Move Fast to Restore the Rule of Law

Andy Worthington
The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

Nadia Hijab
A Music School Silenced in Gaza

Dan Bacher
Unholy Alliance: Nature Conservancy Backs Schwarzenegger's Big Ditch

Catherine Fenton
The American Peace Movement and Israel

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Caught Stealing

Valia Kaimaki
Why Greek Youths Took to the Streets

Richard Morse
Haiti's Gas Gang

David Yearsley
To Gotham City with Dexter Gordon

Charles R. Larson
The Horror, the Horror

Richard Rhames
Gaza and the Goon Squad Meet the Wizard

Stephen Martin
Meltdown Memo to Come?

Lorenzo Wolff
What They Sing About When They Sing About Love

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Beatty and Valentine

Website of the Weekend
Gaza Protest

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

January 13, 2009

Is Torture Ever Legal?

What to Ask Eric Holder

By DAVID SWANSON

On Thursday, January 15, at 9:30 a.m., the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold its confirmation hearing for Attorney General nominee Eric Holder. If the senators are willing to work together and to listen to those of us who elected them, the questioning might go something like this:

Mr. Holder, is the water torture, often now referred to as "waterboarding", torture? Are beatings torture? Are electric shocks torture? Is hanging someone by their wrists torture? What about the combined and repetitive use of sleep deprivation, subjection to temperature extremes and stress positions, threatening with dogs, and sexual humiliation -- is that torture?

What about employing any of the techniques we've discussed until the result is death: up until the point where it becomes murder is such activity torture? Is it cruel? Is it inhuman? Is it degrading?

Does our Bill of Rights ban cruel and unusual punishment? Does the Universal Declaration of Human Rights ban both torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment? Under Article VI of our Constitution is the UDHR the supreme law of the land? Does the Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War ban violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture, as well as outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment? Under Article VI of our Constitution are the Geneva Conventions the supreme law of the land? Does the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights ban torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment? Does the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment require that the United States work to prevent all forms of torture? Are these last two treaties the supreme law of the land? Does Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 2340A ban torture and conspiracy to torture?

Is torture ever legal? Is murder ever legal? If the Justice Department issued a so-called legal opinion declaring torture legal, would government officials who requested that opinion and then claimed to be following it have a legal license to torture?

Would it be a violation of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment to fail to prosecute torture? In prosecuting a crime that has been established as an illegal government policy, does the law require prosecuting those who created the policy or only a few token examples of the lowest ranking individuals who carried it out?

In a January 2002 CNN interview you said:

"One of the things we clearly want to do with these prisoners is to have an ability to interrogate them and find out what their future plans might be, where other cells are located; under the Geneva Convention you are really limited in the amount of information that you can elicit from people. It seems to me that given the way in which they have conducted themselves, however, that they are not, in fact, people entitled to the protection of the Geneva Convention. They are not prisoners of war."

Can you please give us your definition of which human beings fall under the Geneva Conventions' protections, which fall under the protections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which fall under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which fall under the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which fall under the protections of our Constitution, and which do not effectively have human rights? Is it your understanding of the law that only prisoners of war must be protected from torture?

Are you aware that in 2005 the United States Congress redundantly criminalized torture, and President George W. Bush signed the bill into law but added what he called a "signing statement" supposedly giving himself the right to torture despite the law he had just created? Can you find signing statements anywhere in our Constitution? Did the president have any rights after issuing that so-called signing statement that he did not have beforehand? Can any president alter any law by appending a signing statement to it?

Do you believe that apart from prisoners of our judicial system and prisoners of war, and in direct violation of the explicit requirements of the Fourth Geneva Convention, a third category of prisoners legally exists called "enemy combatants," that our laws support this contention, and that these prisoners are not entitled to universal human rights? Is it legal for the United States or any secret agency or mercenary or contractor thereof to kidnap and hold people outside of our judicial system or without the rights provided by our laws? Is it legal for the United States to ship prisoners to other nations in order to deprive them of legal protections?

Do you believe our laws change during war time, yes or no? What legally determines whether or not our nation is at war?

Do you believe that our laws can be ignored once they have been on the books for a quarter century? Is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act a law that need not be enforced? Is part of the job of the attorney general to ensure that FISA is enforced and its violators prosecuted? Are you aware that George W. Bush has openly admitted to violating FISA?

Are you familiar with Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 371, dealing with conspiracy to defraud the United States? And Sections 1341 and 1346 prohibiting using mail and wire communications to defraud the public? Would the justification of an aggressive war, itself banned by the United Nations Charter, and the pretense of defensive rationales strike you as one of the more significant or more trivial topics on which Congress and the public might be defrauded?

Are you aware that Article I, Section 9, of our Constitution bans the spending of public money without appropriation by Congress? Are you aware that President George W. Bush secretly spent money not appropriated for that purpose to secretly begin the invasion of Iraq? Are you aware that the Department of the Treasury has been giving and loaning trillions of dollars without congressional approval?

Are you aware that congress members and scholars and former federal prosecutors have developed long lists of the statutory violations publicly known to have been committed by President George W. Bush and Vice President Richard B. Cheney? Does the topic seem unimportant to you?

Is it legal for the Justice Department to hire and fire and prosecute on the basis of loyalties to a political party?

Is it legal for the Justice Department to issue opinions declaring violations of laws to be legal? Do such opinions have any force of law?

James Madison and George Mason argued that the U.S. Constitution should include the power of impeachment in case a president were ever to pardon a crime that he was himself involved with. Is it possible that they also believed that the pardon power included the right to engage in that very abuse, and that they simply refrained from ever pointing out this problem? Can a president legally order someone to commit murder and then pardon that murder? Can a president legally order someone to crush a boy's testicles and then pardon that testicle crushing? Would such pardons, in contrast to merely corrupt and abusive pardons such as you yourself have facilitated in the past, fail to actually be pardons at all, given their fundamental conflict with maintaining any system of law whatsoever?

Between 1 percent and 100 percent, please tell us what percentage of the crimes you would anticipate prosecuting will have already occurred when you prosecute them, as distinct from crimes you will prosecute that will not have occurred yet? Is there a deterrent value to punishing crimes? Do you believe that prosecuting crimes is in conflict with or in support of moving forward, advancing, looking to the future, and focusing on better days to come?

You once said:

"The Attorney General is the one Cabinet member who's different from all the rest. The Attorney General serves first the people, but also serves the president. There has to be a closeness at the same time there needs to be distance."

If there is a conflict between the law and the wishes of the president, which will guide your actions?

Will you create an independent prosecutor to prosecute the top officials responsible for crimes committed by the Bush administration?

Will you take steps to ensure that any commissions established by this Congress and/or the president do not delay or interfere with possible prosecutions or provide immunity to high-level criminals?

If an employee of the Justice Department publicly reveals criminal activity in the Justice Department while you are in charge of it, will that whistleblower be rewarded or punished?

If the House, Senate, and committees thereof reissue next week all of the subpoenas that have been illegally ignored by your predecessor, will you enforce them? If Congressional committees choose to use their own inherent power of contempt and compel the Capitol Police to imprison individuals held in contempt until they agree to testify openly and honestly before Congress, will you attempt in any way to interfere with the activities of the first branch of this government?

David Swanson is the author of the upcoming book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. He can be reached at: david@davidswanson.org

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