Today's Stories

November 24, 2009

Mary Lynn Cramer
Health Care Reform and the Skinning of Seniors

November 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
A Trial That Will Convict Us All

Jonathan Cook
Have Israeli Spies Infiltrated International Aiports?

Edward S. Herman / David Peterson
Vulliamy's Smears

Bouthaina Shaaban
What's New? It's Always Been Like This

Helen Redmond
Health Care's Historic Flop

Rannie Amiri
Saudi Arabia's Attack on Yemen

Dave Lindorff
Abortion and Health Care

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Self-Delusionary American Tragedy

Mike Whitney
Is American Casino the Best Picture of the Year?

Mark Weisbrot
Honduran Dictatorship is a Threat to Democracy in the Hemisphere

David Michael Green
The Placeholder Presidency of Obama

November 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
CounterPunch Diary
It's Show Trial Time!

Gareth Porter
New Light on the Qom Facility

Mike Whitney
The Great Stimulus Debate of '09: Crybabies need not apply

Fred Gardner
Mammography
Pushes Back

James J. Brittain
It's Really a War on the Poor
A War on Coca Nobody Believes

Jonathan Cook
Rabbi Followers 'Terror Cell in Parliament'

Alan Farago
Bulletin from the Dark Side: Florida's Republican Ultras

David Macaray
A Hindu Version of the UAW
Labor Strife in India

Binoy Kampmark
The Israeli Exception: Gilo and East Jerusalem

Ben Sonnenberg
Ashes and Diamonds
Retirement Norwegian Style

Ron Jacobs
Judge Roy Bean Takes Manhattan

David Yearsley
200,000 Testicles Offered Up to the Gods of Song

Brenda Norrell
A Border Runs Through Them:
The Struggles of the Tohono O'odham

Ron Ridenour
The Tamils and Equal Rights of Self Determination

November 19, 2009

Christopher Ketcham
The Dumbest Newspapers at the Center of the World

Shamus Cooke
A Fraudulent Jobs Summit

John V. Walsh
Impotent in China

Saul Landau
Dissidents Make Noise--Oops, News

Ralph Nader
Exiting Afghanistan

Nikolas Kozloff
Blackout in Brazil

Fred Gardner
Reputable MDs Buy NorCal Health Care

Charles R. Larson
Voices of the Silenced

John A. Murphy
Nader v. Dodd

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Obama's Gray World

November 18, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Religious Scoundrel

John Ross
Hot Oil!

Conn Hallinan
Strategic Towns: Why Gen. McChrystal's Plan Will Fail

Mike Whitney
Obama's China Junket

Ray McGovern
The Bogus Success of the Surge

Nelson P. Valdés
Cyber Cuba: Internet, Broadband and Foreign Policy

Ramzy Baroud
Globalization Unchecked

Ron Ridenour
Tamil Eelam: the Historic Right to Nationhood

November 17, 2009

Mike Whitney
Let's Get Fiscal

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Double Crossed: War Vets Deported

Brian M. Downing
Do They Subscribe to GQ at the Pentagon?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Two-Tiered Justice System

Joanne Mariner
A First Look at the Military Commisions Act

Dean Baker
Obama's Nuclear Option on the Yuan

Martha Rosenberg
Pig Hell at Wal-Mart Supplier

Danny Weil
Fear in Nicaragua

David Macaray
Retail Sales as Combat

Laura Flanders
Buried Bonanza for Over-Builders

Walter Brasch
Rush to Judgment on Terror Trials

November 16, 2009

Alan Nasser
Obama's Flawed Case Against Single Payer

Jonathan Cook
Campus Watch Copy Cats

Mark Weisbrot
Obama, China and the Dollar

Carol Miller
We Need Health Care, Not Insurance

Gary Leupp
The Andolan in Kathmandu and the Revolution to Follow

Harry Clark
Justice Goldstone at Brandeis

Ray McGovern
Shining a Light on the Roots of Terrorism

Norman Solomon
California Democrats Urge Obama to Leave Afghanistan

Ron Ridenour
Genocide in Sri Lanka

Norm Kent
Doctors Light Up

Brenda Norrell
Torture Resisters Arrested at Fort Huachuca

November 13-15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
A Man in a Hundred

Patrick Cockburn
Meet Our Afghan Ally: Stealing Money, Selling Heroin and Raping Boys

Tariq Ali
Short Cuts in Afghanistan

Douglas Lummis
Obama, Hatoyama and Okinawa

Vijay Prashad
Can the Major Speak?

Carl Ginsburg
Cornering the Market on Ambition

Manuel García, Jr.
The Purpose is Pork

Rannie Amiri
The Disastrous Presidency of Mahmoud Abbas

Mary Lynn Cramer
Death By Denial: the Militarization of Mental Health

Fred Gardner
Pot Doc Down

Dave Lindorff
Health Care Reform: DOA

Robert Jensen
How I Stopped Hating Thanksgiving and Learned to be Afraid

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Death Stampede Revisited

Corporate Crime Reporter
Exposing Timberland: Nike Foe Jeff Ballinger Zeros in on a New Target

Ron Jacobs
No More Star Spangled Eyes

David Model
NATO's Chimerical Enemy in Afghanistan

John V. Walsh
Godless China: What Obama Will Find

Jon Mitchell
Beggars' Belief

Stuart Easterling
Blaming the Narcos in Mexico

Dan Bacher
Big Oil Takes Over Marine "Protection" in California

Franklin Lamb
Lebanese Students Advise Obama on How to Get It Right

Farzana Versey
Moderns, Models and Martyrs

Charles R. Larson
War, Peace and Paramilitaries in Colombia

Saul Landau
The Coen Bros. Brutalize Job

David Yearsley
When the Cirque Meets the Beatles

Lorenzo Wolff
At the Side of the Frontman

Poets' Basement
Blaine, Rivas and Cox

November 12, 2009

Robert Weissman
Maniacal Deregulation

Franklin Spinney
The Afghan War Question

Nadia Hijab
After Fort Hood

Afshin Rattansi
Night Vision: Why US Sanctions on Syria Will Kill American Soldiers

Paul Craig Roberts
America's Dismal Future

Ralph Nader
Failing the People on Health Care

Belén Fernández
Tourists of the Honduran Counter-Revolution

Allan J. Lichtman
A National Peacemaker's Day

Dave Lindorff
President Peacenik's War

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Headline of the Year

November 11, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Crafting of a Loophole

Mike Whitney
A Small "d" Depression

Rev. Jesse Jackson
Where's the Jobs Stimulus?

Jeff Nygaard
Iranian Irrationality? Maybe Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Regime Reneges on Political Deal

James Ridgeway
The End of the Little Red Cars: Memories of East Berlin

Eamonn McCann
Blood on Their Hands

Michael Ortiz Hill
Unbecoming War and Terrorism

Shepherd Bliss
From Oklahoma City to Fort Hood

Walter Brasch
"This is Jenna Bush Reporting ... "

November 10, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape

Dean Baker
How to Raise $140 Billion a Year From Wall Street Banks

Rose Ann DeMoro
The Truth About the House Health Care Bill

Ramzy Baroud
Inch by Inch, House by House: How Israel Won the Settlement Battle...Again

Peter Lee
The Dalai Lama Sticks His Thumb in the Dragon's Eye

Dave Lindorff
Blaming the Workers

Roberto Rodriguez
Running Past PTSD (Or My Susto Profundo)

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Self-Dismembering F-35

Alan Farago
The Rising Tide

Joseph Grosso
The Legacy of Albert Parsons

November 9, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Leave Afghanistan to the Afghans

Linn Washington
Fox Finds a New Black Boogeyman

Carl Ginsburg
To be Young and Unemployed Forever

Jeff Leys
War Funding, 2010

John A. Murphy
Can Lieberman Save Single Payer? Why Progressives Should Back a Filibuster

John Halle
Bard and the Lobby: Final Thoughts on the Kovel Affair

Bouthaina Shaaban
Clinton Dances With Netanyahu

James Ridgeway
Heath Care: Winning a Battle, Losing the War

Dave Lindorff
The Kafka Economy

David Macaray
The Philadelphia Transit Strike

Stephen Fleischman
The Tea Party System

Website of the Day
Cap-and-Trade: The Huge Mistake

November 6-8, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Too Fat to Fight

Mark Grueter
Inside the American University of Iraq

Paul Craig Roberts
The Evil Empire

Patrick Cockburn
Friendly Fire

Gareth Porter
Karzai's Cabinet of Warlords

Mike Whitney
The Battle of Seattle, 10 Years Later

James Bovard
How the Media Enables Government Lies

Dean Baker
Don't Touch the Banks!

Robert Lawless
Empires and the Sullying of Anthropology

Saul Landau
Afghanistan: a War Without Logic

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Black Ops and Fort Hood

Stephanie Westbrook
My Memories of Fort Hood

M. Shahid Alam
How Eurocentric Are You?

Marc Levy
Walking With Mr. Muhammad

Franklin Lamb
Obama's Mid-East Mess

Ron Jacobs
A New Map of Hell

David Ker Thomson
Afternoon With Tulip

John V. Whitbeck
Moment of Truth

Julien Mercille
Drugs and Afghanistan: the UN's Misleading Report

Rannie Amiri
Egypt's Next Unelected President?

John Ross
Legalize It!

David Michael Green
Can You Hear Us Now?

Carl Finamore
Strike One for Hotels in San Francisco

Farzana Versey
The Farce of Fatwas and Political Expediency

Missy Comley Beattie
No to Single Payer, Yes to Prayer?

Charles R. Larson
Business as Usual in India

David Yearsley
Anna Magdalena, Music and the Art of Dying

Kim Nicolini
"Paranormal Activity:" a DIY Horror Film

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Devreaux Baker

November 5, 2009

Pam Martens
The Fire Sale of America

Vijay Prashad
The Great Heretic

Brian Gallagher
The Soldiers From Standard Oil: Harvard, ROTC and American Foreign Policy

Norman Solomon
The Next Phase in Health Care Apartheid

Nadia Hijab
The Battle for Palestinian Representation

Joseph Shansky
And the Winner in Honduras is ... the United States?

Andy Thayer
Questions and Answers From Maine

Tracy Rosenberg
Pacifica and the Barbarians Who Pay the Bills

Website of the Day
All Folked Up

November 4, 2009

Stan Cox
The Inflated Promise of Natural Gas

Andy Worthington From Gitmo to Palau: Who are the Uighurs?

Robert Weissman
The Medicare-for-All Moment

Susan Galleymore
Of Veterans and Volunteers

Ralph Nader
Hoh's Afghanistan Warning

Michael Leonardi
Italy's Secret Ships of Poison

Bitta Mistofi
Death to No One: Isolating and Taunting Iran Will Only Empower the Regime

Robert Bryce
From Lahore to Copenhagen

Martha Rosenberg
Is Your Doctor's Continuing Ed Funded by Drug Makers?

Dave Lindorff
Democrats Crash and Burn

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Backtrackers

November 3, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
The Delegitimization of Karzai

Mike Whitney
Why the Crisis Isn't Going Away

Franklin C. Spinney
Katrina and the Paralysis of Fear

Laura Carlsen
The Little Coup That Couldn't

Serge Halimi
Don't Blame the Internet

John Stanton
Social Decay in America

Sophia Weeks
A Guatemalan Lament

Dave Lindorff
Country Joe, Kenny Rogers and Obama

November 2, 2009

Steven Higgs
Autism Spikes, Toxins Suspected

Ishmael Reed
White in America: Behind the Scenes at CNN

David Macaray
UAW Members Vote Down Ford; and the Media Attacked the Union

Bouthaina Shaaban
Settler Colonialism: Return to the Middle Ages

David Michael Green
Coming to Get You

David Swanson
The Two Percent Robustness

Ellen Brown
Cutting Wall Street Out

Adam Federman
Trading the Watershed to Trash the Catskills

James McEnteer
Doppleganger Politics: Star Wars, Clone Wars

Stephen Fleischman
Foot in the Door: Capitalism and Health Care

Website of the Day
Secret California Park Giveaway

October 30 - Nov. 1, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Long Gaze of the State

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank
Facing Down the Machine: Mike Roselle Draws a Line

Carl Ginsburg
Living in the Shadow of Yankee Stadium

Mike Whitney
Obama Goes Wobbly Over More Stimulus

Joe Bageant
The Iron Cheer of Empire

Gareth Porter
Security By Warlords: the CIA's Afghan Payroll

Saul Landau
The Cuban Embargo

Anthony DiMaggio
Conspiracy, Inc.: Wild Tales From the Reactionary Right

Dave Lindorff
Happy Talk Amid the Wreckage: Stocks Up, Jobs Down

Rannie Amiri
The Spooks of Beirut

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
An Afghan Travelogue

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Who Will Reform the Health Care Reform?

Rev. William E. Alberts
God's Favorite Team (and Nation and Religion)

Alvaro Huerta
The Abominable Mr. Dobbs

Martha Rosenberg
Marketing Drugs to Psychoneurotics

Binoy Kampmark
Don't Give Us Your Wretched: Refugee Policy in OZ

Norm Kent
Not Just Zig-Zag Any More: Medical Marijuana Goes Mainstream

Charles R. Larson Roth's "The Humbling:" Nothing Like a Novel From an Old Pro

Ron Jacobs
One Man's Truth, Another Man's Lies

David Yearsley
Not Loud Enough by Half

Lorenzo Wolff
The Vulnerability of Lauryn Hill

Kim Nicolini
"Big Fan:" Football, Class and Sexuality in America

Poets' Basement
Davies, Heyen and Orloski

Website of the Weekend
Coal Country Music

October 29, 2009

Michael Neumann
Criticism of Israel: a Wonderful Hiding Place

Mike Whitney
Housing Rebound? Not So Fast

Gary Leupp
Matthew Hoh Speaks Truth to Power

Conn Hallinan
Roman Roads and Modern Emperors

Marshall Auerback
Obama's Bogus Populism: Pay Curbs and Bank Loans

Laura Flanders
Palin's Pet Doug Hoffman Has Taliban Ties

Eamonn McCann
The War Criminal Vote: Blair or Karadzic for EU President?

David Macaray
Strange Invaders: Can Ignorance and Arrogance Win Hearts and Minds?

Mark Weisbrot
When Small Countries Lead the Way

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Complicity in Torture Challenged

Christopher Brauchli
Will the Pope Bring the Taliban Into His Flock?

Website of the Day
The USS Liberty Affair and the Problem of Truth in History

October 28, 2009

Moshe Adler
How to Reduce Unemployment, Rebuild the Middle Class and Free Ourselves From Wall Street

Dave Lindorff
America's Drug Crisis: Brought to You by the CIA

Frank Joseph Smecker
Agaisnt Prometheus: an Interview with Derrick Jensen on Science and Technology

Alexandra Early
What a "Jobless" Recovery Means for Young Workers

M. Shahid Alam
Israeli Exceptionalism

Vijay Prashad
Sahelian Blowback: What's Happening in Mali?

John Ross
Three Years Later, Brad Will is Still Dead

Franklin Lamb
A Rare Victory for Lebanon's Palestinians

Gregory Travis
The Dismal Science: Elinor Ostrom's Nobel

Susan Galleymore
Peace Cycle to Palestine

Website of the Day
Newspaper Decline, a Graphic Display

October 27, 2009

Mike Whitney
Black Tuesday and How We Got Out of It

Patrick Cockburn
Bombs Will Go Off in Baghdad, Whether the US is There or Not

Stewart J. Lawrence
Honduran Coup Myths Dispelled

Alan Farago
Power Plays in Florida: Rate Increases, Nukes and Deception

Ralph Nader
Obama: Form Letters and Business as Usual

Dave Lindorff
Pentagon Dirty Bombers: DU in America

Bouthaina Shaaban
The Danger of Towing the Line Behind Israel

Brian M. Downing Elections in Afghanistan, the Second Time Around

Iain Boal
How You Can Save Pacifica

Carl Finamore
Hotel Workers and the Law of Momentum

Jayne Lyn Stahl
Here Comes That Third Party: Palin and the Constitutionalists

Website of the Day
How Bank of America Charges for Perfect Credit

October 26, 2009

Bill Quigley /
Deborah Popowski
When Gitmo and Abu Ghraib Come Home

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for the Next Crisis?

Uri Avnery
A Tsunami Called Goldstone

Mike Whitney
Will the Dollar Remain the World's Reserve Currency in Five Years?

Michael Snedeker
The Execution of Cameron Willingham

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Dirty War on Immigrants

David Michael Green
Paranoia for Breakfast

Martha Rosenberg
Gagging Michael Pollan

Patrick Bond
Gridlock on the Way to Copenhagen

Binoy Kampmark
Heading for the Tiber

Website of the Day
Goldman Sachs Abandons Kittens

November 24, 2009

Torture in Kandahar

Canada's Guantanamo

By ERIC WALBERG

A scandal erupted last week in sleepy Ottawa with the revelations of Canada’s chief diplomat in Kandahar in 2006-07, Richard Colvin, who told a House of Commons committee on Afghanistan that Afghans arrested by Canadian military and handed over to Afghan authorities were knowingly tortured. His and others’ attempts to raise the alarm had been quashed by the ruling Conservative government and he felt a moral obligation to make public what was happening.

The startling allegations — the first of their kind from a senior official — have caused extreme embarrassment to the government, which has more than once stated categorically detainees were not passed to Afghan control if there was any danger of torture. Canada has 2,700 soldiers in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar, the hotbed of the insurgency, on a mission that is due to end in 2011.

Warnings to Colvin to keep quiet were not enough to cow him and he calmly told shocked MPs that he started sending reports soon after he arrived in Kandahar in early 2006 to top officials indicating the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) was abusing detainees. “For a year and half after they knew about the very high risk of torture, they continued to order military police in the field to hand our detainees to the NDS.”

Colvin’s comments come at a sensitive time for the minority government, which was almost ousted by the opposition a year ago. So far 133 Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan and recent polls indicate most Canadians oppose the mission. Colvin said Canadian military leaders in Afghanistan “cloaked our detainee practices in extreme secrecy,” refused to hand over details of prisoners to the Red Cross in a timely fashion and kept “hopeless” records. “As I learned more about our detainee practices, I came to the conclusion that they were un-Canadian, counterproductive, and probably illegal.” Officials in Ottawa initially ignored his reports. “By April 2007 we were receiving written messages from the senior Canadian government coordinator for Afghanistan to the effect that we should be quiet and do what we were told,” he said.

Canadian troops first began transferring detainees to Afghan authorities in late 2005. Eventually, faced with persistent allegations of abuse, Ottawa signed a deal with Kabul in May 2007 to boost protection for detainees. Colvin said Canadian troops regularly detain six times as many Afghans as the British, who are also operating in southern Afghanistan. Although some may have been Taliban members, many were “random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time”. He added: “We detained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent people. Complicity in torture is a war crime.” In the face of accusations of this complicity, Prime Minister Stephen Harper publically insisted Canadian military officials did not send individuals off to be tortured. “Behind the military’s wall of secrecy that unfortunately was exactly what we were doing,” Colvin told his captive audience.

Now, instead of launching an inquiry, the Conservatives are pursuing their usual practice of smearing critics. “We frankly just found his evidence lacked credibility. All his information was, he admits, at best second hand,” said Lawrie Hawn, parliamentary secretary to Defense Minister Peter MacKay. MacKay angrily dismissed the charges, while former Canadian military chief-in-command in Afghanistan Rick Hillier can’t “remember reading a single one of those cables”, and depicted the fuss as mere “howling at the moon”. “Even in our own prisons somebody can get beaten up,” he cracked to reporters.

But then this is standard operating procedure for Harper’s Conservatives. They called New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton “Taliban Jack” for his suggestion that NATO should negotiate with elements of the Taliban. That is now the policy not only of Canada in Afghanistan, but of the Karzai government in Kabul.

In The Unexpected War, Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang report that the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Amnesty International, and Canadian Louise Arbour, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights “had concluded that abuse, torture, and extrajudicial killing were routinely inflicted on people in Afghan custody.” University of Ottawa Law Professor Amir Attaran documented how Afghan detainees have been beaten not only by the NDS, but while detained and interrogated by Canadian soldiers. Attaran called for an investigation into the treatment of the detainees by the Military Police Complaints Commission, a civilian body established to investigate complaints against the Canadian military. In February 2007, the Canadian military launched an investigation and heard testimony concerning three Afghans beaten by Canadian soldiers, handed over to the Afghans, who subsequently disappeared. The Globe and Mail managed to interview thirty former detainees who said they had been transferred from Canadian to Afghan jurisdiction and then had been tortured.

Then defence minister Gordon O’Connor told the House of Commons that a new agreement struck with the Karzai government stipulated that “If there is something wrong with their treatment, the Red Cross or Red Crescent would inform us and we would take action.” This was exposed as a lie when Red Cross spokesman Simon Schorno told the Globe and Mail that “we were informed of the agreement, but we are not a party to it and we are not monitoring the implementation of it.”

Colvin immediately warned that the new agreement was full of holes. It can only be concluded that the government condoned the torture, ignoring and now pooh-poohing complaints about it. Attempts to feign innocence don’t hold water. According to a senior NATO official, Harper used a “6,000-mile screwdriver” to make sure “that every single statement that went out [was] cleared by him personally”.

Michael Semple, Colvin’s EU colleague in Kabul, said he was “totally flabbergasted” by insinuations that Colvin’s reports were not credible, that he was a closet Taliban sympathiser “soft on terrorists”. Colvin was an “absolutely rock solid” diplomat who volunteered to go in as a civilian representative with Canada’s Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kandahar after a close friend of Semple’s was killed by a suicide car bomber outside Kandahar.

But to anyone who knows anything at all about US -- and now, alas, Canadian -- politics this is hardly new. Colin Powell’s rise to the heights of US politics was due to his burying the initial reports of the My Lai massacre in 1968 where US troops gunned down 500 mostly women, children and seniors in an act of revenge. Charged with investigating the incident, then major Powell reported, “In direct refutation of this portrayal is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent.” Powell was promoted to lieutenant-colonel in 1970, served a White House fellowship under president Richard Nixon from 1972-73, and continued up the ladder, becoming a general in 1989 and finally secretary of state in 2001.

Current Canadian politics occasionally provides a touch of humour to the inanities of Western moral hypocrisy. Remember the travel ban imposed by the Conservative government on UK MP George Galloway this spring, apparently because he is a terrorist. The Conservative government denied it had anything to do with the decision, that it was entirely up to the Canada Border Services Agency. Or the current furore over US lesbian soldier Bethany Lanae Smith, whom a Canadian judge insists be granted refugee status, overturning an Immigration and Refugee Board ruling. Not because she rejects the illegal US wars and occupations, but because she was harassed by male US soldiers and resented their taunts and/or untoward advances.

The recent haemorrhage of US war resisters coming to Canada has been resolutely staunched by the pro-war government, in line with its fervent support of US/ NATO wars. But in the interests of political correctness the government may well allow Smith to stay, unlike her more principled fellow soldiers, male and female, who defected to Canada out of conviction, and who were sent back to the US to face jail terms.

Will there be any consequences to Colvin for his embarrassing revelations? Word has it that the hitherto promising career of the former second-in-command in Afghanistan and current high-level diplomat in Washington is over. Remember the fate of UK ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray from 2002-2004 whom the Foreign Office tried to declare noncompis mentis, and who resigned, supposedly in disgrace. His altercation with the empire sobered him and made him a committed anti-imperialist. At his site, he even posts an update of US-caused deaths in Iraq, now at 1,339,771.

If Colvin’s career as a diplomat is over, he can still take a page from Murray ’s post-FO career book. His expose of Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov as one of the world’s most eminent torturers, Murder in Samarkand, is now being made into a feature film. He has been awarded multiple prizes for promoting world peace, ran for parliament against his former boss foreign minister Jack Straw, and is a witty and incisive commentator on the internet, PressTV and elsewhere. He is currently rector of his alma mater the University of Dundee. There is life after the death of diplomatic service. Murray quips, “Being a dissident is quite fun.”

Eric Walberg writes for Al-Ahram Weekly http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/. You can reach him at http://ericwalberg.com/

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