Today's Stories

January 22, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Another Real Estate Crisis is About to Hit

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

January 19, 2009

Kevin Alexander Gray
Time for an New Divestment Campaign

Uri Avnery
The Boss Has Gone Mad

Kathy Kelly
Respite in Gaza

Mike Whitney
What Obama Left Out of His Economic Recovery Plan

Lawrence R. Velvel
Investing with Bernie Madoff

Mats Svensson
For Fatima in Gaza

Harry Browne
Obama's Bard: Springsteen's Working on a Dream

Norman Solomon
The Return of Triangulation

Jeffrey Sommers
The Baltic Riots: Really Existing Thatcherism

Kenneth Libby
Manipulating MLK Day

Peter Ewart
Robbie Burns, Mackenzie and Gaza

Bob Sommer
"The Fierce Urgency of Now"

Website of the Day
Death of a Whaler

January 16-18, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to the Chief

Caoimhe Butterly
Terribly Bloodied, Still Breathing

Audrey Stewart /
Kathy Kelly
Suddenly Bombs Started Falling: Report from Gaza

Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Geo. W. Bush, a Concise Biography

Ellen Cantarow
I Could Not Save a Single Child

Neve Gordon
How to Sell "Ethical" Warfare

Vijay Prashad
An African-American in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Attack Injures 1.5 Million Gazans

Rannie Amiri
The UN in Israel's Crosshairs

Andy Worthington
Guantánamo's Forgotten Child

Joshua Frank
Forecasting Obama

Dave Lindorff
Prosecuting Bush and Cheney

Brian Cloughley
Who Runs America?

Belén Fernández
Changing the Equation

Missy Beattie
Peace and Justice Denied

Fred Gardner
Growing Pot for Research

George Ciccariello-Maher
"Oakland is Closed!"

John V. Whitbeck
Democracy Not Partition

Stephen Fleischman
Card Check

Mischa Gaus
Medicare for All! Tackling Union Opposition to Single-Payer

Saul Landau
The End of the Affair

Norm Kent
Perils of the Grow House

Alejandro López
Give Bush the Shoe! (and Send Us the Photo)

David Yearsley
The Glory That Was Dresden

James McEnteer
Doin' the Time Warp Again

Lorenzo Wolff
An Album That Lives Up to Its Cover

Kim Nicolini
Patti Smith's Dream of Life

Poets' Basement
Three Financial Poems by Brian J. Foley

Website of the Day
Lancet: Medical Conditions in Gaza

January 15, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff

Karl Grossman
Obama and the Military - Industrial - Scientific Complex

M. Shahid Alam
Gaza's Shattered Mirror

Jules Rabin
Gaza Besieged, Gaza Mauled

Alan Farago
The Nail-Gun Bailout

Ron Jacobs
The State of Black America: From Oscar Grant to Barack Obama

Timothy Seidel
Just Violence in Gaza? The Calculus of Proportionality

George Ochenski
Why No Montana Wilderness?

Todd Chretien
Taking a Stand for Justice in Oakland

Bob Fitrakis /
Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Marijuana Prohibition Acid Test

Website of the Day
Uranium Watch

January 14, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
Killing Children With Impunity

Kathy Kelly
Cease Fire, Cease Siege

Franklin Lamb
A Second Front? Hezbollah Militants Chafe as Gaza Burns

Mike Whitney
The Big Contraction: Why the Stimulus Alone Won't Work

Paul Craig Roberts
The Humiliation of America

Glen Ford
Sullying Dr. King's Legacy: the Congressional Black Caucus and Israel

Aditya Chakrabortty
The End of Property Porn

Dave Lindorff
Fattening the Rats: Feeding at the Bailout Trough

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Arab Parties From Elections

David Swanson
Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment

Martha Rosenberg
Fragile: Handle with Risperdal

Website of the Day
Report of a Red Cross Worker in Gaza

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Is Israel Using Experimental Weapons in Gaza?

Michael Neumann
Hamas and Gaza: Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions

Coleen Rowley /
William John Cox
No Victors in the War on Dissent

Robert Sandels
Cuba and the Obama Administration: Subversion Through Trade?

Saul Landau
The Changeling: an Obama Nightmare

David Swanson
What to Ask Eric Holder

Wajahat Ali
Waltzing with War Crimes

Sam Bahour
No Other Option? A View From the West Bank

Stanley Heller
Why It's Useless to Lobby Congress on Gaza

Robert Jensen
Beyond Grief and Rage

Robin Mittenthal
Eating Away at the Land That Feeds Us

Website of the Day
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

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 22, 2009

Why Obama Was Right

Halting the Gitmo Trials

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Two separate universes were in evidence on Tuesday. In the world of Barack Obama, the sense of change, the optimism and the intelligence were palpable, as two million Americans from every part of the United States -- and numerous visitors from around the world -- flocked to Washington D.C. to watch his inauguration as the 44th President of the United States.

Meanwhile, in the world of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, 242 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay -- held, for the most part, for seven years without charge or trial -- spent another day in an isolation more profound than that endured by the most dangerous convicted criminals on the US mainland.

Change will come for these prisoners too, and hopefully very soon. In one of his first acts as President, Barack Obama ordered prosecutors in Guantánamo’s Military Commission trials (the much-criticized system dreamt up by Dick Cheney and his close advisers in November 2001) to ask for a four-month stay on all proceedings, "in the interests of justice,” and in order to give “the newly inaugurated president and his administration time to review the military commission process, generally, and the cases currently pending before the military commissions.” He also circulated a draft of an executive order in which he promised to review the cases of the remaining 242 prisoners, and to close Guantánamo within a year.

By Wednesday afternoon, the judges in the cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other prisoners accused of planning or facilitating the attacks of September 11, 2001, and Omar Khadr, a Canadian accused of killing US Sgt. Christopher Speer with a grenade during a firefight that led to his capture in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old, acceded to the President’s request, and it seems likely that other judges will follow suit.

However, what will happen over the next four months remains uncertain. As the President weighs up conflicting choices -- with some advising him that the federal court system is perfectly well-equipped to deal with the cases of genuinely dangerous prisoners, and others claiming that another brand-new trial system is needed -- those who advocate the latter should look closely at the events that took place at Guantánamo in the two days leading up to the inauguration.

To put it bluntly, on January 19 and 20, everything that is wrong with Guantánamo and the Bush administration’s ill-conceived, cruel and inept “War on Terror” was on display in two courtrooms at Guantánamo, where pre-trial hearings were taking place in the cases of Omar Khadr and the alleged 9/11 co-conspirators. And while these hearings, above all, cast a ghastly light on the gathering of intelligence in the “War on Terror,” and its ruinous effect on the lives of those caught up in a global web of rumors, lies and false confessions masquerading as facts, they also demonstrated the obstacles to justice that arise when innovators -- of whatever political hue -- attempt to replace an ancient and well-established legal system with something new.

The unforeseen empowerment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

If the homicidal wing of global jihad has a star, it is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, whose previous appearances at pre-trial hearings (in June, September and December last year) attracted substantial media attention. Commentators suggested that the timing of this latest hearing was designed to reflect glory on the Bush administration on the eve of Obama’s inauguration, but if this was the case then it was an unmitigated failure.

As with previous hearings, the system itself was plagued with problems, and Mohammed was allowed to dominate proceedings, whereas, if the allegations against him -- and his own declarations -- are true, he should, instead, be facing a trial in a federal court, where his outbursts would at least be circumscribed.

The hearing was ostensibly to discuss ongoing questions about the mental competency of one of the defendants, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who, according to court records, is “on undisclosed psychotropic drugs.” Instead, however, it descended into a familiar farce. As the Arabic translators struggled to keep up (another recurring problem), several of the defendants attempted, unsuccessfully, to persuade the judge, Col. Stephen Henley, to move their lawyers, so that they were not sitting at the same table. Even so, Mohammed managed to sneak in a quick reference to torture, as he has done in every other hearing. ”The people who have tortured me received their salaries from the American government, and the lawyers do, too,” he said.

Later, as part of a rambling disquisition, which is allowed because, under the Commissions’ rules, he is permitted to represent himself, Mohammed addressed the desire for martyrdom that has also been prominent in previous hearings. “We don't care about capital punishment,” he explained. “We are doing jihad for the cause of God.” When Henley directed him to stick to the topic at hand, he countered with, “This is terrorism, not court. You don't give me the opportunity to talk.” For once, however, Mohammed’s antics were overshadowed by bin al-Shibh, who interrupted legal discussions to exclaim, “We did what we did and we are proud of this. We are proud of 9/11.”

Omar Khadr’s dubious confession

But while the 9/11 pre-trial hearing demonstrated, yet again, that a novel trial system is no match for the federal courts on the US mainland, which have successfully dealt with 107 trials related to terrorism since 9/11 (as described in a Human Rights First report, In Pursuit of Justice (PDF)), the other pre-trial hearing this week -- that of Omar Khadr -- tackled two other questions at the very heart of Guantánamo’s credibility: whether confessions made in generally abusive circumstances can be trusted at all, and how utterly groundless confessions can, in circumstances of hysteria and fear, come to be regarded as constituting robust “actionable intelligence,” with horrendous knock-on effects on those implicated in these false claims.

These issues were under examination as the result of a long campaign by Khadr’s defense team to have the right to question US personnel who had interrogated Khadr in Bagram and Guantánamo, in an attempt to show that he had only made apparently incriminating statements through coercion, or as an attempt to avoid punishment or gain favors from his interrogators.

The question of dubious confessions arose when a female agent, identified only as “Interrogator 11,” who had interrogated Khadr at Guantánamo, testified that he had admitted throwing the grenade that killed Sgt. Speer. According to the agent, the incident took place after three other men had been killed and Khadr “cowered under a bush as the soldiers moved in,” as a CBC News report explained. “He pulled the pin and just chucked it over his shoulder,” the agent said. “He had never thrown one before, so he just threw it over his shoulder, like he had seen in the movies.”

Although the interrogator claimed that Khadr was “very happy” to speak to her, and that, “when he would come to the room, he was always smiling,” there are three major problems with her story.

The first, as has been demonstrated in several hearings in the last 14 months, is that other reports by eyewitnesses are completely at odds with her account. In November 2007, for example, it was revealed, just 36 hours before Khadr’s trial was supposed to begin, that his defense team had just been informed of the existence of “potentially exculpatory evidence” from a “US government employee,” who was an eye-witness to the gunfight in Afghanistan that led to Khadr’s capture.

Further disturbing revelations followed last year. In March, Kuebler explained that the report of the circumstances that led to Khadr’s capture, written by an officer identified only as “Lt. Col. W.,” had been altered after the event to implicate Khadr, and at another hearing on December 12 a witness identified only as “Soldier No. 2” produced further evidence indicating that Khadr could not have thrown the grenade. In a motion submitted by Khadr’s lawyers, he stated that he “thought he was standing on a ‘trap door’ because the ground did not seem solid.” He then “bent down to move the brush away to see what was beneath him and discovered that he was standing on a person; and that Mr. Khadr appeared to be ‘acting dead.’” Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler explained that photographs taken at the scene, which were not shown to observers of the trial proceedings, “show a pile of rubble from the collapsed roof, and then show the debris moved aside to reveal Khadr lying facedown in the dirt,” which “make it abundantly clear Omar Khadr could not have thrown the hand grenade that killed 1st Sgt. Speer.”

The second reason for doubting the agent’s account, as CBC News also reported, is that she was “unable to explain why she destroyed her notes of the interrogation sessions after she had typed them up,” which strikes me as deeply suspicious, and the third, which cuts to the heart of the defense team’s doubts about whether any confession by Khadr is reliable, concerns the circumstances of his treatment in Guantánamo at the time the statement was made.

Although a date was not given for when Khadr supposedly made his confession, he was subjected to appalling mistreatment both in Bagram, where he was held for three months after his capture, and in Guantánamo, where he was subjected to an array of abusive techniques -- derived from torture techniques taught in US military schools to train US personnel to resist interrogation, and to provide false confessions -- which were heavily criticized by the Senate Armed Services Committee in a damning report last month (PDF) that blamed senior administration officials for instigating a pervasive culture of prisoner abuse.

In Khadr’s case, these techniques included prolonged isolation in a freezing cold cell, beatings, and being short-shackled in painful positions until he urinated on himself. On one particularly humiliating occasion, he reported that the guards “poured a pine-scented cleaning fluid over him and used him as a ‘human mop’ to clean up the mess.”

Under these circumstances, it is difficult to see how any confession can be trusted. As Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler explained on Monday, Khadr “regularly lied to his interrogators to avoid being abused.”

No one is safe from rendition and torture

This was disturbing enough, but testimony by another interrogator on Monday, FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, added a chilling new dimension to the ways in which dubious confessions have been interpreted in the “War on Terror,” providing a rare insight into the bleak world of “extraordinary rendition,” secret prisons and outsourced torture that Barack Obama must also tackle if he is to have any hope of fulfilling his ambition to restore America’s moral standing in the world.

According to Fuller, who interrogated Khadr in the US prison at Bagram airbase for two weeks in October 2002, when Khadr was shown a photograph of Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer of Syrian origin, who was seized at New York’s JFK airport on September 26, 2002, he identified him by name and said that he recognized him because he had seen him at an al-Qaeda “safe house” in Kabul, Afghanistan “on several occasions,” adding that he also “might have seen him” at an al-Qaeda training camp.

Fuller’s testimony was largely ignored outside Canada, but it sent shockwaves through the Canadian media, and for good reason. On October 9, 2002, the day after Khadr reportedly identified him, Arar was subjected to “extraordinary rendition” by the US authorities. Flown to Syria, he was tortured for ten months before being released, and after his return to Canada was awarded 10.5 million Canadian dollars in compensation. Despite this, the US authorities had never explained why they had sent Arar to Syria, and had refused to remove his name from a terrorist no-fly list.

Now, of course, it appeared that they had sent Arar to Syria because of what Omar Khadr had told an FBI interrogator, and that they refused to clear his name because they still harbored suspicions that he was connected to terrorism, even though Arar had only been seized initially because he had been placed on a watch list by the over-vigilant Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who had alerted the US authorities, and even though he had insisted all along that he had never been to Afghanistan.

Those who knew about Arar’s case were, of course, appalled. Lorne Waldman, Arar's former lawyer, explained to the Toronto Star that before Arar’s compensation was paid, Stockwell Day, the Canadian public safety minister, “was apparently shown the entire Arar file” by the US government, and “later asserted there was no reason in his view that Arar should remain on a watch list.” Waldman added that if Day “was told he was shown the whole file, either we have a major problem if he wasn't shown this, or he was shown it and he attached no credibility to it.”

Waldman was right, of course, but the truth only emerged during the cross-examination of Fuller, when it turned out that the FBI agent’s notes did not mention Khadr identifying Arar by name, and that they revealed that Khadr only “stated that he looked familiar.” Fuller added in his notes that “in time” Khadr “stated he felt he had seen” Arar in Afghanistan, but neglected to mention in his testimony that the period when Khadr “felt” he had seen Arar was in late September and early October 2001, when he was in Canada, under surveillance by the RCMP.

Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler described Fuller's testimony as a “gift” from the government, and there is, I think, no doubting that he was right, but what is particularly chilling about the testimony of both “Interrogator 11” and Robert Fuller is not just how false confessions can so easily be dressed up as the truth, and how a prisoner saying that someone in a photo “looked familiar” can lead to that person’s rendition to horrendous torture, but how both of these responses are typical of the supposed evidence that is used to hold numerous other prisoners in Guantánamo, to this day, and that has also, presumably, been used as an excuse to fly other prisoners to torture prisons around the world, either run by the CIA or in third countries prepared to act as proxy torturers.

Secret prisons and Guantánamo lies

On this latter point, we still have disturbingly little evidence to go on, because so few prisoners have emerged from the secret prisons to tell their tales, although the number of innocent men who have resurfaced, to be freed without charge, suggests that the process has been both disturbingly widespread, and as generally lacking in evidence as the case of Maher Arar. They include, to name but a few, Khalid El-Masri, a German who was kidnapped in Macedonia and rendered to torture in the CIA’s “Salt Pit” prison in Afghanistan because he had the same name as a man who allegedly provided assistance to the 9/11 attackers, Laid Saidi, an Algerian seized in Africa, who spent 16 months in the “Salt Pit” and the “Dark Prison,” another secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, and Marwan Jabour, a Palestinian seized in Pakistan in May 2004, who spent over two years in another secret prison in Afghanistan (PDF).

As for Guantánamo, confessions that do not equate with other known evidence, and statements that other prisoners “looked familiar” -- accompanied by accounts of their presence in places they had never been -- are a cornerstone of the Bush administration’s approach to intelligence-gathering. I discovered numerous examples while researching my book The Guantánamo Files, and others have been exposed by diligent military officials, including Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, a veteran of US intelligence who worked on Guantánamo’s tainted tribunals, and an unnamed Lieutenant Colonel in the US Army, who discovered that one particular prisoner, described by the CIA as a notorious liar, had made false allegations against 60 prisoners in total.

Another example surfaced just last week, during the habeas corpus review of Mohammed El-Gharani, a Chadian national and Saudi resident who was seized in a raid on a mosque in Karachi, Pakistan, when he was just 14 years old. Ordering his release “forthwith,” Judge Richard Leon lambasted the government for attempting to build a case that El-Gharani had been in Afghanistan -- and had been part of an al-Qaeda cell in London when he was 11 years old -- by relying on statements made by two other prisoners whose unreliability had been flagged by government officials.

As President Obama prepares to sign his executive order announcing that Guantánamo will be closed within a year, these are the kinds of stories we need to know, both to make sure that he sticks to his timetable, and, I believe, to ask him why, after seven years, he needs a whole year to dismantle a prison built on lies.

Andy Worthington is a British historian, and the author of 'The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison' (published by Pluto Press). Visit his website at: www.andyworthington.co.uk He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

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