Today's Stories

July 20, 2009

Pam Martens
Judicial Apartheid

July 17-19, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"Watch What We Do, Not What We Say"

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

Joanne Mariner
CIA Apples: Bad at the Top of the Tree

Joe Bageant
America's White Underclass

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Road Signs: Wiping Arabic Names Off the Map

Saul Landau
Why So Much Sympathy for Madoff's Dupes and So Little for the Poor?

John Ross
Jurassic Fallout in Mexico

Sue Sturgis
Senator Sessions, Race and Impartiality

Anita Sinha /
Daniel Farbman
The Ricci Case and the Myth of Special Treatment

Peter Morici
Obama's Donut Economics

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Whither Pakistan? A Five-Year Forecast

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the Language of Power

Greg Moses
The Real Demand Crisis

Kia Mistilis
The Niger Delta Crisis

Missy Beattie
The Placebo President

David Ker Thomson
How Not to See: Things to Tell Your Eyeballs

James G. Abourezk
Evil Spirits: the Booze Strip in Indian Country

Paul Richards
Why Does Jon Tester Want to Log Wild Montana?

Dave Lindorff
Dark Days for Working People (With Three Small Rays of Light)

Marc Levy
Just Like Hanoi Jane

Matt Siegfried
The Good War Goes Hot

Stephen Martin
Panopticon Blues

Ben Sonnenberg
Sembène's Faat Kiné

David Macaray
Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History

Charles R. Larson
A Pakistani, Victorian Novel Celebrating Women

David Yearsley
That's Women for You: Abbas Kiarostami's Così

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Rattle and Roll: the Sound From England's Gutters

Poets' Basement
Payne, Anderson and Williams

Website of the Weekend
Hitler Learns of Sarah Palin's Resignation

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

Gregory V. Button
The Search for Environmental Justice in Perry County, Alabama

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

Russell Mokhiber
White House to ABC News: No Obama Single-Payer Doc

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

Nicholas Dearden
Paying the Climate Debt: the G-8's Troubling Model

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

David Rosen
Shouts From the Gallery: the Sotomayor Hearings and the Culture Wars

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

Eamonn McCann
The Emperors of Bombast: Bono, U2 and the Crisis of World Capitalism

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

Alice Slater
How US Missile Defense Plans Sabotaged Nuclear Disarmament Talks With Russia

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

Joe Allen
The Fight to Save James Hickman in Jim Crow-Style Chicago

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

Tim Wise
Off the Deep End: Private Clubs, Public Prejudice

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

José Pertierra
The Cuban Five: a Cold War Case in a Post-Cold War World

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

Nikolas Kozloff
C Street Band: Sex Scandals, Moral Hypocrisy and the Far Right Agenda in Latin America

Clifton Ross /
Marcy Rein
U.S. and Honduras: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Good Neighbor

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

Michael Neumann
Say It Loud, Say It Proud: There is No God!

Gilad Atzmon
The Left and Islam: Thinking Outside of the Secular Box

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California Dreamin': How the State Can Beat Its Budget Woes

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

Dave Lindorff
CIA Lies: Why Isn't Congress in Open Revolt?

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

Raymond Lawrence
Michael Jackson as Sexual Pervert: the Calumnies of Peter King

Walid El Houri
Neda and Marwa: a Tale of Two Murdered Women

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

July 9, 2009

Ronnie Cummings
How Industry Giants are Undermining the Organic Foods Movement

Jonathan Cook
Two-State Solution, Israeli-Style

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduran Destablization, Inc.: Otto Reich and the International Republican Institute

James Bovard
McNamara's Other Body Count

Norman Solomon Afghanistan: the Escalation Scam

Allan Nairn
Indonesia Gets to Pick Its Killer

Andy Worthington
Revamping the Military Commissions

Tomas Borge
The Sadsack Soldiers of Honduras

Nadia Hijab
Palestinian Titanic

Paul Krassner
How Jeff Goldblum Didn't Die

Website of the Day
Dave Lindorff Wants Your Money--Will Give Good Reports

July 8, 2009

Saul Landau
In Amazonia

Dean Baker
The Green Shoots are Dead: Why the Economy Needs a Third Stimulus

Winslow T. Wheeler
Gates, Congress and the F-22

Eric Walberg
Obama in Russia

Ray McGovern
Is Texas Harboring a Torture Decider?

David Rosen
When Sadism Goes Systematic: Prison Rape as Policy

Dr. Mona El Farra
Gaza From a Distance

Ron Jacobs
McNamara and the Post: When Idiocy and Hubris Merge

Benjamin Dangl
High Stakes in Honduras

Alan Farago
How I Almost Pitched McNamara Into the Sea

Website of the Day
Ayatollah So

July 7, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank

Uri Avnery
Israeli Court Rebukes Military

Brian M. Downing
Crossing the Helmand

Gary Leupp
Biden, Israel and Iran

Gregory A. Burris
My Brush With Homeland Security

David Macaray
When in Doubt, Blame a Labor Union

Laura Flanders
Obama Hushes Health Care Advocates

Alan Farago
Princple Over Principal

Greg Moses
Texas Patels Take Over Dallas Bank

Dan Bacher
Three Big Lies About the Peripheral Canal

Website of the Day
Tragedy at Toncontin

July 6, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Hussein's FBI Interviews

Diana Johnstone
Zionist Fanatics Practice Serial Vandalism in Paris

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduran Coup to Venezuelan Coup: Same Old Globalizers and Torture School Grads

Gary Leupp
Operation Khanjar Begins

Jonathan Cook
Israel Calls on Ultra-Orthodox Jews to Stop "Arab Takeover"

Tim Wise
Of Fireworks and False Memories

Franklin Lamb
Cynthia McKinney and the Kidnapping of the Spirit of Humanity

Charles R. Larson
Sarah Palin, Plain and Tall

Carlos Benemann
California's Bingo Bondage: Getting Paid in IOUs

Shepherd Bliss
The Soulless Machine: Caught in the Cellphone Snare

Jerry Kroth
Stuart Levey and World War III

Karyn Strickler
A Fell-Swoop Moment Missed

Website of the Day
The Rise in Military-Backed Public Schools

July 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Gob Smacked

Eamonn Fingleton
Detroit's Collapse: the Untold Story

Jeffrey St. Clair
Is the Bald Eagle Really Back?

Mike Whitney
Running on Empty

Pam Martens
The Parable of Michael Jackson's Debts

George Ciccariello-Maher
The Counter-Revolution Will Not be Tweeted

Paul Craig Roberts
The Big Whorehouse on the Potomac

Patrick Cockburn
The Haggling Over Iraqi Oil

Anthony DiMaggio
A Perilous Path: Iraq and the Language of De-Escalation

Roger Burbach
Honduran Coup: Target Left?

John Ross
Left's Grip on Mexico City Slips

Nikolas Kozloff
Meet Jim Demint: Coup Apologist

Gareth Porter
The Iran Canard

Andy Worthington
Finally, a Trial Date in the African Embassy Bombings Case

Saul Landau
Bad Times, Worse Habits

David Macaray
How We Spend Our Money

Adam Federman
The Recovery That Wasn't

Jane Slaughter Labor's Vague Rally for Health Care

Russell Mokhiber Black Caucus Muzzled on Israeli Kidnapping of McKinney

Robert Jensen
Beyond Independence

Robert Bryce
Hey, Paul Krugman, Here are 2.4 Billion More Climate Traitors

Belén Fernandez
The Situation in Honduras

Missy Comley Beattie
Would Jesus Pack Heat?

C. G. Estabrook
La Cina e Vicina

Stephen Martin
The Fog of Economic War

Charles R. Larson
Adichie on Her Own

Lorenzo Wolff
A Voice Like a Newsreel: the Soul of James Carr and the Civil Rights Movement

Kim Nicolini
The System That Hijacked New York

Poets' Basement
Farrelly, Kazak and Stadler

Website of the Weekend
Paul Krassner v. Larry King

July 2, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
The Wall Street White House

Nikolas Kozloff
Spinning the Honduran Coup

Wendell Potter
Obama's False Friends of Health Care Reform

Ellen Hodgson Brown
California's Empty Wallet

Christian Christensen Iran: Networked Dissent?

Patrick Irelan
Lost in Patagonia

Binoy Kampmark Returning Iraq

Nicola Nasser
Ethnic Cleansing as State Policy

Brian Tokar
Climate Bill: Cap(italize) and Trade(Off)

Dan Bacher
Panama Canal North?

Website of the Day
Scheuer on Immigration: "The only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States."

July 1, 2009

Vijay Prashad
Iran and Us

Alberto Vallente Thorensen
Why Zelaya's Actions Were Legal

Paul Craig Roberts
Pirates of the Mediterranean

Robert Weissman
150 Years

Manuel García, Jr.
The New Crisis in Aviation

Victor Figueroa-Clark / Pablo Navarrete
Honduras, a Coup With No Future

Norman Solomon
The NYT and Troop Deaths: Abstract Quality Journalism

Franklin Lamb
Remembering Amnon Kapeliouk

Martha Rosenberg
When Doctors Boo

Diane Rejman
Mothers and Military Lies

Website of the Day
The Color of the Race Problem is White

June 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Debt Deflation Arrives

Esam Al-Amin
Iran and Washington's Hidden Hand

Benjamin Dangl
Showdown in Honduras

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Doctors Collude in Torture

Franklin Lamb
Hezbollah After the Elections

George Wuerthner
Beetle Hysteria ... Again: the Truth About Bugs, Fires and Ecosystems

Todd Gordon
Acceptable Versus Unacceptable Repression

Ron Jacobs
Mark Sanford, Sexual Liberation and LGBT Equality

Kenneth Libby
Conditions for Citizenship

Julian Vigo
Feeling Michael Jackson

Website of the Day
Inside the Mega-Churches

June 29, 2009

Ishmael Reed
The Persecution of Michael Jackson

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup in Honduras: Obama's Real Message to Latin America?

Clifton Ross
Coups and Constitutions: From Bolivia to Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Why Iraq is Now the Most Corrupt Country on the Planet

Uri Avnery
Between Tel Aviv and Tehran

Conn Hallinan
Dealing With North Korea: Why Threats and Sanctions Will Backfire

James G. Abourezk
Where the Money Isn't Going

Ralph Nader
The Holes in Obama's Financial Regulation Plan

Carol Miller
Why Fiscal Conservatives Should Love Medicare-for-All

Greg Moses
Jobs First

Website of the Day
Key Leaders of Honduran Coup Trained in the US

June 26-28, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Hate Crimes Bill: How Not to Remember Matthew Shepard

Jeffrey St. Clair
Meet the Retreads: Obama's Used Green Team

Doug Peacock
Elk River: History and the Yellowstone

Daniel Wolff
The Night Before: a Glimpse of the Lenape

Mike Whitney
What the Big Banks Have Won

John Ross
The New York Times and Stolen Elections

David Rosen
Cry, Hypocrite, Cry: the Tradition of Sex Scandals and American Politicians

Emily Ratner
Thoughts on Manhood From the Rafah Tunnel

Gareth Porter
Airstrike Report Belies "Blame Taliban" Line

Farid Marjai
Green, But Not Velvet

Nadia Hijab
The Rift in Iran: Memo to the "Do Something" Brigade

Paul Craig Roberts
Gun Control: What's the Agenda?

Fred Gardner
FDR's Real Defining Moment: Ending Prohibition

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Father's Day

Paul Watson
Fear and Loathing in Madeira

David Ker Thomson
Nothing

Farzana Versey
The Man in the Mirror: Michael Jackson as Tramp

Geoff Berne
Obama and Charter Schools: The Showdown at Schottenstein

Todd Alan Price
Ohio: Birthplace of Charter Education ... and Opposition to It

Ramzy Baroud
People for Sale in a Hungry World

Jeff Sher
Health Care Showdown

Dr. Carol Paris Despite My Arrest by Max Baucus, I Will Continue to Advocate for Quality Health Care for All

Walter Brasch Adultery as Family Value?

Glen Johnson
The Village and the Wall

Charlotte Laws
Hold the MSG!

Charles R. Larson
Dickens in Morocco, Sort Of

Kim Nicolini
The Erasure of Art

David Yearsley
Yankee Prof Takes on Dallas

Lorenzo Wolff
When the Songs Remain the Same

Poets' Basement
Larson, Davies, McLellan and Gardner

Website of the Weekend
Kayakers vs. Shell Oil

June 25, 2009

Kathy Kelly
Now We See You, Now We Don't

Jack Bratich
You Provide the Tweets, We'll Provide the Info War: the Media and the Iranian Protests

Wendell Potter
The Health Insurance Industry v. Health Care Reform: a Former Insurance Industry Insider Tells All

Charles R. Larson
Don't Cry for Him, Argentina! GOP Sex Scandal of the Week

Alan Farago
The Tears of Mark Sanford

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Firms Accused of Profiting Off Holocaust

Gareth Porter
Khobar Bombings: Telltale Signs of Saudi Fraud

Bitta Mostofi /
Bill Quigley
"You Will Not Get Past Us"

David Macaray
Six Ways to Reinvigorate Labor

Mark Schuller
Haiti's Elections: "Beat the Dog Too Hard"

Website of the Day
Worst Slide Story

June 24, 2009

Andrew Cockburn
How the U.S. Has Secretly Backed Pakistan's Nuclear Program From Day One

Dean Baker
Making Financial Regulation Work

Andy Worthington
The Story of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco

James Bovard
Obama and the Torturers

Diana Gibson /
Ray McGovern
Torture Eats the Soul

P. Sainath
The Age of the Everyday Billionaire

Gareth Porter
Investigating the Khobar Tower Bombing: Why Was Al Qaeda Excluded From the Suspects List?

Robert Alvarez
The Department of Energy's Nuclear Albatross

Dave Lindorff
Medicare for All

Steven Colatrella Remembering Giovanni Arrighi

Website of the Day
Protest as Terrorism

June 23, 2009

David Price
Obama's Classroom Spies

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq Reels Toward a New Era

James Ridgeway /
Jean Casella
Bi-Partisan Bull on Health Care: Three Ex-Senators Get It Up for the Health Care Industry

Dave Lindorff
Using the Economic Crisis to Attack Workers

Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Puerto Rico: Biotech Island

Gary Leupp
Dennis Ross Moves to the White House

Brian M. Downing
The Erosion of the Mullahs' Monolith

Robert Bryce
Are Theocracies Doomed?

Nicholas Dearden
The G8 is Dead

Yousef Munayyer
Seeing Through Israeli Delay Tactics

Website of the Day
The Great White Father of America

June 22, 2009

Michael Hudson
Obama's (Latest) Surrender to Wall Street

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in the Iranian Presidential Election? A Hard Look at the Numbers

Chris Floyd
Dexter's Legions in Afghanistan

Jack Z. Bratich
The Fog Machine: Iran, Social Networks and Genetically Modified Grassroots Organizations

Atash Yaghmaian
We Children of the Revolution

Laura Carlsen
Victory in the Amazon

Paul Craig Roberts
The U.S. Regime-Change Recipe for Iran

Vijay Prashad
Gun v. Butter: Now You are Only Poor

Fred Gardner
Charles Lynch Gets a Year and a Day (No Thanks to Eric Holder)

Andy Thayer
The Blank Check: How We Got the Obama-DOMA Debacle

David Macaray
Unions and the Newspaper Crisis

Website of the Day
The Most Spied Upon Town in America?

June 19 - 21, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
I Become an American

Jeffrey St. Clair
Firebrand: Rod Coronado's Flame War

Patrick Cockburn
Who Will Control Iraq's Oil?

Al Giordano
What the Left Should be Learning From Iran

Henry A. Giroux
The Iranian Uprisings and the Challenge of the New Media

Anthony DiMaggio
The Electoral Façade

Paul Craig Roberts
Are the Iranian Protests Another US Orchestrated "Color Revolution?"

John Ross
46 Dead Mexican Toddlers: Sacrificed on the Altar of Neoliberalism

Gareth Porter
Spinning Civilian Deaths in Afghanistan

Carl Ginsburg
Obama's Bix Fix: Placating the Bankers, Again

Tommi Avicolli Mecca
40 Years After Stonewall: From Smash the Church to Going to the Chapel

Joe Bageant
Workers' Rights: No Balls, No Gains

Serge Halimi
Protectionism: We've Been Here Before

P. Sainath
Price of Rice, Price of Power in India

Jim Goodman
The Claim Deniers: Why the Health Insurance Industry Doesn't Deserve Our Trust

Dave Lindorff
Obama's Health Care Waterloo

Rannie Amiri
Bush Jumps Over Maine, Carter Lands in Gaza

Robert Fantina
Iran, Obama and McCain

Harvey Wasserman
Big Nuke's Radioactive Hoax in Impoverished Ohio

Walter Brasch
They Got Away With Murder: 12 Angry White People

David Ker Thomson
This Moment's Bill of Rights

Charles R. Larson
No Voice: Telling Her Mother's Story

David Yearsley
Escape From the Torture Chamber

Kim Nicolini
When the Closet is the Culprit

Ben Sonnenberg
Rossellini and the Art of Ambiguity

Poets' Basement
Beatty and Kowitt

Website of the Weekend
Grown in Yellowstone, Slaughtered in Montana

July 20, 2009

Gitmo Trials Resume

Predictable Chaos

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

At Guantánamo last week, the Military Commission trial system convened for only the second time since President Obama announced a four-month freeze on all proceedings on his first day in office to give the new administration’s inter-departmental Guantánamo Task Force an opportunity to review the best ways in which to deal with the remaining prisoners inherited from the Bush administration.

Reviving the Commissions, ill-advisedly

In May, in a major speech on national security, Barack Obama signaled that he was planning to revive the Commissions, arguing that, with some amendments, they would be “fair, legitimate, and effective,” and promising to “work with Congress and legal authorities across the political spectrum on legislation” that would fulfill these aims.

Pleasant though it was to hear a President talk of involving Congress, without having to have his arm twisted to do so, Obama’s willingness to revive the Commissions flew in the face of widespread opposition from civilian lawyers and a wide range of legal experts, and, most significantly, from seven former prosecutors who resigned in disgust at what they saw as the politicization of the system or its irremediable faults (including Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor, and Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, who resigned last September), and all of the government-appointed defense attorneys, who have been prepared to risk their careers to oppose what they all realized was an unjust system.

Critics -- myself included -- were not placated by Obama’s proposed tweaking of the Commissions’ rules, and insisted that the only way forward was to drop the Commissions and proceed with federal court trials. Bizarrely, on the same day as Obama’s speech, the administration announced that Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a suspect in the 1998 African embassy bombings, would face a trial in New York, and, moreover, in an accompanying press release, the Justice Department trumpeted its “long history of … successfully prosecuting terror suspects through the criminal justice system” (and attached a list of successful prosecutions over the last 16 years), which rather seemed to prove the point that the Commissions -- which have achieved only three dubious results (David Hicks, Salim Hamdan and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul) -- should not be revived.

Nevertheless, in the last few weeks the Senate Armed Services Committee -- and its chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, who really should know better -- bowed to the President’s wishes and tweaked the wording of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (which revived the Commissions after the Supreme Court ruled that their first incarnation was illegal), even though, as I reported last week when Lt. Col. Vandeveld delivered testimony to the Committee which should have halted the politicians in their tracks, it still allows the use of information masquerading as evidence that was obtained through coercion, and still allows for hearsay information to be appraised as evidence by judges who are not qualified to make such decisions.

The legislation has yet to be approved by the Senate, but last week the Commissions reconvened anyway, even though the as-yet-undecided debate about their future added another layer of confusion to events that, as has been typical throughout the long and ignominious history of the Commissions, involved technical difficulties, uncooperative prisoners, and bouts of wrangling over the rules.

An outlandish claim kicks off the proceedings

One of the week’s few dramatic highlights came at the very beginning. Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, before the pre-trial hearings began, Navy Capt. John Murphy, the Commissions’ new chief prosecutor, announced that prosecutors were ready to proceed with cases against 66 of the remaining 228 prisoners (the 229th, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, is already locked up for life -- in a cell on his own somewhere in Guantánamo -- after his disturbingly one-sided trial in November).

As David Danzig, Deputy Program Director at Human Rights First, explained, Murphy said, “We have 66 viable cases,” and added that he was “personally comfortable” that “the government could mount a case that would not depend on evidence gathered through the use of coercion.” Danzig also noted that Murphy “refrained from commenting on whether the government might seek to bring some of those cases to trial in federal civilian courts.”

Personally, I’m amazed that Murphy could claim that there are as many as “66 viable cases,” given that intelligence reports over the years have put the number of prisoners with any meaningful connection to terrorism as somewhere between two dozen and 40 of the prisoners (and also given that, of the 23 cases that were still active when Bush left office, two involved juveniles, and at least eight of the cases had nothing to do with “war crimes”), but what particularly exercised some of the reporters was that the prosecutor’s office seemed to be “making decisions about what evidence was appropriate and what evidence was not appropriate to use without any independent review.”

Vic Hansen, a former Army Judge Advocate General officer who was observing the proceedings for the National Institute of Military Justice, said, “They say repeatedly that they are not going to rely on evidence that was obtained using coercion. Well, it’s the prosecution who is making that call alone without any transparency.”

This was a very valid point, and as Danzig noted, although Murphy “said that the prosecution had developed ‘a standard’ to ensure that no evidence obtained improperly would be used in the trials … he declined to elaborate on that standard,” and did not refer to the fact that the Senate is still discussing whether to impose a voluntariness standard (at the instigation of the Obama administration), which, as Danzig stated, “would presumably exclude coerced evidence.” As Hansen added, “What it comes down to is more or less the government saying, ‘just trust us.’”

Challenges and calls for delay in the case of Ibrahim al-Qosi

On Wednesday, when the pre-trial hearings were supposed to begin, court staff complained they couldn't hear Navy Cmdr. Dirk Padgett introduce himself as a prosecutor in the case of Ibrahim al-Qosi, one of three prisoners whose cases were being discussed that day, prompting a reply from Padgett that, to some, could serve as a motto for the whole of the Commissions. “Hopefully, this is going to get better,” he said.

In the event, things didn’t get better at all. In the case of al-Qosi, a 49-year old Sudanese prisoner who is accused of being a bodyguard and sometime driver for Osama bin Laden, prosecutors called for a delay “in the interests of justice” until September, which would, apparently, give the Obama administration time to complete its review of the cases. Marine Corps Capt. Seamus Quinn, one of al-Qosi’s prosecutors, stated, “The continuance is needed ... to address and eliminate all possible challenges to this process,” according to Reuters.

The call for a delay infuriated al-Qosi’s defense lawyers, who have long maintained that their client was nothing more than a cook for bin Laden, and of no more significance than Salim Hamdan, one of bin Laden’s drivers, who is now a free man in Yemen, having served a five-month sentence that he was given after his trial last August. As Reuters described it, al-Qosi’s lawyers asked the military judge “to either dismiss the charges or move forward.”

“You cannot sit somebody in indefinite detention,” Navy Lt. Cmdr. Travis Owens said. “It violates every principle we have as Americans.” Invoking what Carol Rosenberg of the Miami Herald described as a “justice-delayed, justice-denied” argument, on the grounds that al-Qosi “was among the first men taken to the prison camps when they opened in January 2002,” Owens added, “He was one of the guys who was kept in the dog cages. Talk about oppressive confinement.”

Challenges and calls for delay in the case of Mohammed Kamin

While the judge, Air Force Lt. Col. Nancy Paul, refused to make an immediate ruling on the prosecutors’ request, even more chaotic scenes took place in an adjacent courtroom, where a second pre-trial hearing was taking place in the case of Mohammed Kamin, an Afghan seized in 2003.

Kamin’s is one of the more ludicrous cases put forward for a trial by Military Commission -- or, for that matter, any kind of trial -- as I explained last March, when he was arraigned:

[Kamin] is accused of “providing material support for terrorism,” specifically by receiving training at “an al-Qaeda training camp,” conducting surveillance on U.S. and coalition military bases and activities, planting two mines under a bridge, and launching missiles at the city of Khost while it was occupied by U.S. and coalition forces. He is not charged with harming, let along killing U.S. forces, and were it not for his supposed al-Qaeda connection -- he apparently stated in interrogation that he was “recruited by an al-Qaeda cell leader” -- it would, I think, be impossible to make the case that he was involved in “terrorism” at all.

On Wednesday, Kamin boycotted the proceedings, telling a military official who offered him the opportunity to take a shower before the hearing, “I’ll take a shower when you guys are ready to send me home.” In his absence, prosecutors also called for a delay, although no one actually turned up to make the request. Instead, a heavily pregnant prosecutor, Navy Lt. Rachel Trest, called in by closed-circuit feed from Washington, although, as Carol Rosenberg noted, “her argument was inaudible at the media center designed years ago to simultaneously broadcast both trials to journalists.”

There was, however, an outburst of drama when, in spite of a court tip sheet predicting that Navy Lt. Rich Federico, one of Kamin’s defense lawyers, would “ask for guidance on how much trial preparation could take place during the White House-mandated interregnum,” Federico instead urged dismissal of the entire case, referring to comments made last week by Justice Department national security lawyer David Kris, who told the Senate Armed Services Committee (PDF), “Our experts believe that there is a significant risk that appellate courts will ultimately conclude that material support for terrorism is not a traditional law of war offence, thereby reversing hard-won convictions and leading to questions about the system’s legitimacy.”

As this is the only charge Kamin faces, Federico told the judge, “They cannot ethically proceed on this charge in this forum. It’s appalling. It’s just a waste of everyone’s time.” The Wall Street Journal added that he also said that the government’s continued pursuit of the case was “unethical, immoral and unjust,” called the proceedings “a charade, a complete fraud,” and stated that the Commissions remained “a broken system.”

As with al-Qosi’s case, Kamin’s judge, Air Force Col. Thomas Cumbie, refused to make an immediate ruling on the prosecution’s call for a delay -- or Federico’s unexpected intervention -- although, in response to a challenge from Federico he conceded that “the rules of the court were still evolving,” as Carol Rosenberg put it, and stated, “I’m not saying in any way you ambushed me. Things change.”

Nevertheless, the questions regarding the validity of the “material support” charge are unlikely to go away, and will need resolving before any further hearings take place, Ironically, the charge is a valid crime in a federal court, but has been contested in the Commissions since it was first grafted onto the legislation in 2006. As Salim Hamdan’s civilian lawyer, Harry Schneider, explained on Wednesday, “We’ve always been of the view that [material support] was not a war crime and the conviction should not stand.” He added, as Carol Rosenberg put it, that the debate in the Commissions “appeared to enhance a Hamdan clemency bid already on file with the Pentagon,” and stated that, if the administration does drop material support as a crime in the Commissions, “Salim would be exonerated in the sense that he would never have been convicted of anything.”

No lawyers for Omar Khadr

On Wednesday afternoon, Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was just 15 when he was seized in 2002, returned to the court to resume the discussions about his lawyers that he was having on June 1, when the Commissions first reconvened. On that occasion, as Michelle Shephard explained in the Toronto Star, Army Col. Patrick Parrish “repeatedly lambasted Khadr’s legal team” for their in-fighting, which had led Khadr to conclude that he couldn’t trust any of them, but commended Khadr himself for being “well-spoken” and “professional.”

Six weeks ago, Parrish refused to allow Khadr to be unrepresented, and the Canadian reluctantly decided to stick with Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, who, it must be noted, has campaigned assiduously on Khadr’s behalf, but on Wednesday, Khadr’s suspicions were back to the fore. “I don’t trust the office of military defense,” he said, prompting Parrish to make the unprecedented decision to appoint two civilian lawyers instead.

Mostly a no-show for the 9/11 pre-trial hearing

The big news of the week was supposed to be the pre-trial hearing of the five men accused of involvement in the 9/11 attacks, but in the end this too was a damp squib. No one turned up at all in the morning, after the men refused to leave their cells, and in the afternoon, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the unarguable showman of the group, refused to attend, as did Ramzi bin al-Shibh, even though the hearing was convened to deal with ongoing issues regarding his mental competency, and that of another of the five, Mustafa al-Hawsawi. Al-Hawsawi, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali and Walid bin Attash eventually turned up in the courtroom, but there was little activity.

According to Reuters, “al-Hawsawi soon demanded to leave after complaining he would not be allowed to speak,” and “bin Attash, given five minutes to address the court, complained that the presiding judge, Army Colonel Steven Henley, had not responded to letters the five men had written to him ‘a long time ago.’” In the only flicker of the dissent normally associated with KSM’s presence, he explained, “If you don't have enough patience to take this case, just give it to a different judge. We view the judge and prosecution as one person. There's no difference.” Later, bin Attash showed his disdain for the proceedings by throwing a paper plane -- fashioned, presumably, from his court papers -- at one of his co-accused.

The rest of the session focused on attempts by bin al-Shibh’s lawyers to “allow a defense consultant to examine CT scans of her client's brain and perform further tests, including possibly an MRI, to ‘determine whether any lesions in his brain affect his cognitive functioning.’” Navy Cmdr. Suzanne Lachelier explained that bin al-Shibh has been diagnosed with “delusional disorder,” but when she tried to explain that he had been subjected to sleep deprivation, a court censor cut off the feed to the media center.

In an attempt to rebuff these complaints, one of the prosecutors, Navy Lt. Clayton Trivett, said that bin al-Shibh’s complaints about sleep deprivation may have been produced by his pre-existing condition. Trivett explained that bin al-Shibh “has accused guards of pumping foul smells and loud noises into his cell and ‘vibrating his bed’ to keep him awake,” even though “The government's position is that it's not happening and it's never been happening,” although another interpretation could be that the initial collapse of bin al-Shibh’s mental health was caused by whatever happened to him during the four years that he was held in a secret CIA prison before his arrival at Guantánamo in September 2006.

With no visible progress -- and with the little that did take place overshadowed by the dispute over the charge of material support for terrorism, which would have a knock-on effect on several other cases -- this was another dismal outing for the Commissions, and, surely, another warning for the Obama administration that any kind of revival of the wretched trial system will remain fraught with insoluble problems.

Andy Worthington is a British journalist and 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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