Today's Stories

August 26, 2009

Gareth Porter
The Leaking Game: Planted News Stories About Iran and Nuclear Weapons

August 25, 2009

Gabriel Kolko
Israel: A Stalemated Action of History

Danny Weil
The Charter School Hype and How It's Managed

Martine Bulard
China's Wild West

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
The Cuban Five: The Face of Impunity

Bélen Fernández
Why Didn't the Leopard Eat Tom Friedman?

August 24, 2009

Danny Weil
Obama and Duncan's Education Policy: Like Bush's, Only Worse

Neve Gordon
Stopping the Apartheid State
Boycott Israel

John Ross
Mexico's Supreme Court Tosses a Bombshell into Chiapas

Open Letter to Kenneth Roth
Why Has Human Rights Watch Fallen Silent on Honduras?

Dan Bacher
A Burston-Marsteller Greenwash:
Westlands Hoards Surplus Water While Farmers Suffer

August 21-23, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Right Wing's Prince of Gonzo

Patrick Cockburn
The Truth About Afghan Election

Ray McGovern
Unwritten CIA Death Contract Awarded to Blackwater

Carl Ginsburg
Paycheck President

Dave Lindorff
American Justice is Not Blind, But it is Truly Sick

M. Shahid Alam
An "Abnormal" Nationalism

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Story of Camp Ashraf

Eric Walberg
Russia/Georgia/U.S. One Year Later
Who Came Out Ahead

No War on the Moon!
In Defense of the Dark Side of the Moon

Gilad Atzmon
The Hostage Dream: Loving Oneself at the Expense of Another

Crawdad Nelson
What It's Like to Die

David Yearsley
Why I Chose to Play Scarlatti on Bainbridge Island

Justin Frew
Grim Times for Irish Travelers

Website of the Day
Picket Whole Foods Friday!

August 20, 2009

Eugenia Tsao
Inside the DSM:
The Drug Barons' Campaign to Make Us All Crazy

Dave Lindorff
The Worst and the Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

Yonatan Preminger
The Strategy Behind Israel's Migrant Labor Policies

Wajahat Ali
The Detention of Shah Rukh Kahn

Website of the Day
How to cope with flu pandemics

August 19, 2009

David Michael Green
Guess What? He's a Terrible President

Paul Craig Roberts
Americans: Serfs Ruled by Oligarchs

Marshall Auerback
Debt Revolt? Tax Strike? There are a Lot of Angry People Out There

Franklin Lamb
AIPAC Sends in the Clowns

John Ross
Three Amigos Summit

Marjorie Cohn
Legendary Lawyer Doris Brin Walker Dies; Represented Angela Davis, Smith Act Defendants

August 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Specter of Debt Revolt Is Haunting Europe?

Mary Lynn Cramer
Obama-Fraud: Don't Confuse Medicare with Single-Payer

Jonathan Cook
U.S. Turns Blind Eye to Israel's New Separation Policy

Uri Avnery
Whose Acre?

Ralph Nader
Block Obama's Abject Surrender to Insurance and Drug Companies

Bill Quigley & Davida Finger
Katrina Pain Index - 2009

August 17, 2009

Ray McGovern
Can the Washington Post Save Dick Cheney?

Andy Worthington
Bagram Isn't the New Guantánamo, It's the Old Guantánamo

Patrick Cockburn
Life and Death in Baghdad as Americans Leave

Don Fitz
The True Story of Fox's Hero, Kenneth Gladney

P. Sainath
Drought of Justice, Flood of Funds

Helena Cobban
Zionist Pioneer Renounces Zionism

August 14-16, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Health Plans and Death Plans

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Fall of the House of Stanford

Peter Linebaugh
The Commons, the Castle, the Witch and the Lynx

Esam Al-Amin
What Actually Happened in Fatah's Elections?

Marshall Auerback
Why a Debtor's Revolt Would Work

Mike Whitney
Bulletins From Clunkerville

Paul Krassner
Woodstock at Forty

Saul Landau
Health Care and the Seeds of Disunity

Nikolas Kozloff
Colombian Elites Fear Bolivaran Revolution

Henry A. Giroux
Politics After Hope

John Ross
Sleepwalking Through the Minefield

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Land Sale

Isabella Kenfield
Monsanto's Man in the Obama Administration

David Rosen
Sexual Torture, Yet Again

Ron Jacobs
Unconditional Negotiations, Now!

Wajahat Ali
Obama's Immigration Reforms: Neither Humane Nor Thoughtful

David Macaray
Prison Games

Greg Moses
Down in South Texas: the Geometries of Bob Dylan

Charles R. Larson
Egyptian Economics 101

David Yearsley
Stalked by Bill Evans' Ghost: Kind of Blue at Fifty

Lorenzo Wolff
There Ain't Much to Country Livin': the Drive-By Truckers and the Fine Print

Kim Nicolini
Class, Race and Clint

Poets' Basement
Reiss, Ford and Moser

Website of the Weekend
Timidity and Transparency

August 13, 2009

Eduardo Galeano
I Hate to Bother You

Joanne Mariner
Letting Cheney Off the Hook

Michael Donnelly
Burning Forests for Electricity

Norman Solomon
When the Dead Have No Say

Russell Mokhiber
Boycott Whole Foods

Tim Wise
Sick Heil! The Hitlerizing of Obama

Brian M. Downing
Succession and the Pakistani Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Single-Payer and Medicare

David Manning / Miriam Cotton:
Iran Versus Honduras: a Subtle Difference

Martha Rosenberg
John Hughes, Gone With Only 59 Candles

Website of the Day
Congress Can't Find Their As-teroids

August 12, 2009

Michael J. Watts
Nigeria on the Brink

Bouthaina Shaaban
Where are the Arabs to Stand Up for the Hanoun and Ghawi Families?

Ricardo Alarcón
The Cuban Five: Justice in Wonderland

Binoy Kampmark
Terror Australis

Paul Craig Roberts
Concocting the Appearance of Recovery

Alan Farago
Going Down Absurd: the Future of Florida Bay

James Ridgeway
Ghostwriting Your Meds

Dave Lindorff
10 Questions to Ask If You Find Yourself at an ObamaCare Town Hall Meeting

David Macaray
Labor and the Conventional Wisdom

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Assimilation of Niranjan Ramakrishnan

Website of the Day
A Petition in Support of Janice Harper

August 11, 2009

Ricardo Alarcón
Forbidden Heroes

Marshall Auerback
America's Biggest Economic Problem?

Reza Yavari
Inside Iran's Most Infamous Prison

Winslow T. Wheeler
How Congress Pays For Its Pork

Tim Wise
Red-Baiting and Racism

Uri Avnery
A Moral Person

Deepak Tripathi
Getting Away With Torture

Greg Moses
Time to Plan for the Worst

Benjamin Dangl
Boycotting Big Beer

Dave Lindorff
Hecklers Unite! Why Aren't Progressives Disrupting ObamaCare Town Halls?

Website of the Day
What Bush Told Chirac About the Iraq War

August 10, 2009

David Price
Trial by FBI Investigation

Mike Whitney
There is No Recession; It's a Planned Demolition

Alan Farago
Seeds of Destruction: How the National Economy was Wrecked by the Politics of Deregulation in Florida

Conn Hallinan
The Honduran Coup: a U.S. Connection

Russell Mokhiber
Health Care: In Defense of Disruption

Paul Krassner
The Mystery Behind the Manson Murders

Sousan Hammad
Orgy of the Dead: the 2009 Fatah Conference

Jonathan Cook
Israeli School Apartheid

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Sister-in-Law Detained by Israeli Police; Calls Evictions an Unjustified Folly

George Wuerthner
Dead Tree Hysteria

Website of the Day
Conyers: ObamaCare is Crap

August 7 - 9, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
It Pays to Have a Nuke

Mike Whitney
Economy on a Scaffold

Elaine C. Hagopian
Obama's Israel Albatross

Carl Ginsburg
RX For Healthcare

Miguel Tinker Salas
Honduras is Only Part of the Story: the Conservative Counter-Attack in Latin America

Saul Landau
The Kidney Broker and the Money Laundering Rabbis

John Ross
The Mexican Genome: Big Science in the Service of Indian Genocide?

Anthony DiMaggio Obama and the Israel Lobby: Origins of Power

John Stanton
Expanding Human Terrain Systems?

Christopher Brauchli Legal Absurdities: Outing Three Strikes

Wajahat Ali
A Muslim American Hero: an Interview with Dave Eggers on "Zeitoun"

Ron Jacobs
As Long as the Wars Continue, We Must Resist Them

Franklin Lamb
Sunday Morning on the Dunes: Cleaning "Free Gaza Beach"

Bruce E. Levine
Protect Us From Our Friends

Michael Winship
Neighborhood Watch for Planet Earth

David Macaray
Glimmers of Hope for Labor?

Stephen Fleischman
Suicide Squad

Robert Bryce
Unplugging the Next Big Thing: the Hype Over Electric Cars

Robert Dodge, MD: Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

Mark Seth Lender
The Message of the Glossy Ibis

David Yearsley
Vaucanson's Faun and the Duck in the Attic

Ben Sonnenberg
Chris Fuller's Brilliant Debut

Lorenzo Wolff
When Music's the Character

Poets' Basement
Dominguez and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Warren Buffett's Betrayal

August 6, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Let's All Have a Beer

Paul Craig Roberts
The Expiring Economy

William Blum Assassinations and Coups: Keeping Track of the Empire's Crimes

Michael Donnelly
Rod Coronado: the Hardest Working Man in Animal Rights "Terrorism"

Jonathan Cook
Rabbis Ban Marriage for Israeli "Untouchables"

Dave Lindorff
The Health Care Reform Sell-Out

Ellen Brown
The Public Option in Banking

Website of the Day
Ellsberg on Hiroshima

August 5, 2009

Dedrick Muhammad /
Barbara Ehrenreich
The Destruction of the Black Middle Class

Norman Solomon
The Incredible, Shrinking Health Care Plan

William Blum
The Myths of Afghanistan: Past and Present

Gareth Porter
The ISI and the Taliban: US Officials Are Protecting Pakistani Aid to Taliban

Mary Lynn Cramer
The Myth of Medicare for All

Jim Goodman
Obama Needs to Take a Stand on Trade

Nadia Hijab
Playing From Strength in the Middle East

Gretchen Kroth
Guatemala's Garbage Dump Education System

Steve Macek /
Scott Sanders
Privatizing the Airwaves

Sarah Lazare
Inside G.I. Resistance

Website of the Day
The Locavore Myth

August 4, 2009

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Shell Game

Dave Lindorff
The Recession Isn't Over, By a Long Shot

Patrick Cockburn
Did British Bomb Attacks in Iran Provoke Hostage Crisis?

Jonathan Cook
Israel's Campaign to Silence Human Rights Groups

Jeff Sher
Making a Mess of Health Care Reform

Dean Baker
Why Don't We Globalize Health Care?

Andy Worthington
Gitmo as Hotel California

Uri Avnery
A Jeremiad

Mark Weisbrot
U.S.-Brokered Mediation in Honduras Has Failed

Alvaro Huerta
Hold That Dustbin! So Much for the "End of Racism"

Website of the Day
Pentagon to Ban Facebook and Twitter?

August 26, 2009

Planted News Stories Show New Bid by West to Say Iran Seeks Nuclear Weapons

The Leaking Game

By GARETH PORTER

Western officials are leaking stories to the Associated Press and Reuters aimed at pressuring the outgoing chief of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, to include a summary of intelligence alleging that Iran has been actively pursuing work on nuclear weapons in the IAEA report due out this week.

The aim of the pressure for publication of the document appears to be to discredit the November 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the Iranian nuclear programme, which concluded that Iran had ended work on nuclear weapons in 2003.

The story by Reuters United Nations correspondent Louis Charbonneau reported that "several" officials from those states had said the IAEA has "credible information" suggesting that the U.S. intelligence estimate was "incorrect".

The issue of credibility of the NIE is particularly sensitive right now because the United States, Britain, France and Germany are anticipating tough negotiations with Russia and China on Iran's nuclear program in early September.

The two parallel stories by Charbonneau and Associated Press correspondent George Jahn in Vienna, both published Aug. 20, show how news stories based on leaks from officials with a decided agenda, without any serious effort to provide an objective historical text or investigation of their accuracy, can seriously distort an issue.

Reflecting the hostile attitude of the quartet of Western governments and Israel toward ElBaradei, the stories suggested that ElBaradei has been guilty of a cover-up in refusing to publish information he has had since last September alleging that Iran has continued to pursue research on developing nuclear weapons.

Charbonneau referred without further analysis to U.S. and Israeli accusations that ElBaradei has deliberately underplayed the case against Iran to "undermine the U.S. sanctions drive".

Jahn explained ElBaradei's refusal to publish the intelligence summary as the result of his eagerness to "avoid moves that could harden already massive Iranian intransigence on cooperating with the agency" and his worry that it would increase the chances of a U.S. or Israeli strike on Tehran's nuclear sites.

He also suggested ElBaradei had made "barely disguised criticisms of U.S. policy" in the past and that some of his statements on Israel and Gaza were viewed by the West as "overtly political".

In fact, however, the tensions between ElBaradei and the George W. Bush administration were directly related to ElBaradei's public declaration in March 2003 that the documents on alleged Iraqi efforts to obtain uranium from Niger - later known as the "Niger forgeries" - were not authentic, after he received no response from Washington to an earlier private warning to the White House.

Charbonneau quoted a "senior Western diplomat" as confirming that some of the information the four Western countries want published in the coming IAEA report relate to intelligence documents concerning an alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research program, which the IAEA has referred to as "alleged studies".

What the anti-ElBaradei coalition is now demanding, as Charbonneau's report confirms, is that ElBaradei attach a report prepared by the IAEA safeguards department which reflects the slant of the quartet and Israel on the issue, as an "annex" to the coming report.

What AP and Reuters failed to report, however, is that there has long been a deep division within the IAEA between those who support the "alleged studies" documents, led by safeguards department chief Olli Heinonen, and those who have remained sceptical about their authenticity.

The doubts of the sceptics were reinforced, moreover, when new evidence came to light last year suggesting that some of the key documents were fabricated or doctored to support the accusation that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

A Vienna-based diplomatic source close to the IAEA confides that the reason ElBaradei has never endorsed the "alleged studies" documents is that they have not met his rigorous standards of evidence.

The United States and other governments refused to give the documents to the IAEA, because ElBaradei had insisted that all the "alleged studies" documents should be shared with Iran and should be authenticated. U.S. officials, supported by Israel, argued that allowing Iran to study the documents carefully would compromise intelligence "sources and methods", according to a U.S.-based source who has been briefed on the matter.

The most important such document to be denied to the IAEA and Iran is a one-page letter from an Iranian engineering firm to an Iranian private company, Kimia Maadan, which is identified as having participated in the alleged Iranian nuclear weapons project.

The letter reportedly had handwritten notes on it referring to studies on the redesign of a missile reentry vehicle, and is thus a primary piece of evidence for the claim that the missile reentry documents were genuine.

However, Iran turned over to the IAEA a copy of the same May 2003 letter with no handwritten notes on it, as Heinonen confirmed in a February 2008 briefing for member states.

That suggested that the copy of the letter with handwriting on it was a fabrication done by an outside intelligence agency in order to prove that Iran was working on nuclear weapons.

There were other problems with the one-page flowsheets showing a plan for a "green salt" conversion facility, which were attributed to Kima Maadan and said to be part of the military-run nuclear weapons project.

According to a Feb. 22, 2008 IAEA report, Iran submitted documentary evidence to the IAEA showing that Kimia Maadan had been created in 2000 solely to plan and construct a uranium ore processing facility under contract with Iran's civilian atomic energy agency, and that it was in financial difficulty when it closed its doors in 2003.

The IAEA, which had been investigating whether the company was working for the Iranian military, as charged by the United States and other Western countries, declared in its February 2008 report that it "considers this question no longer outstanding at this stage".

Furthermore, Iran pointed out that the flowsheets for a "green salt" conversion facility portrayed in the documents as done by Kimia Maadan have "technical errors", and IAEA safeguards director Heinonen conceded that point in his February 2008 briefing.

Questions had also been raised about the technical quality of the alleged Iranian designs for a missile reentry vehicle that was apparently aimed at accommodating a nuclear weapon. Experts at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico who ran computer simulations on the studies determined none of them would have worked, according to Washington Post investigative reporter Dafna Linzer in February 2006.

After the new information surfaced, some IAEA officials, including experts involved in the investigation, argued privately that the agency should now state publicly that it could not authenticate the documents, according to a Vienna-based source close to the IAEA.

The AP's Jahn cited as further evidence of Iran's intention to manufacture nuclear weapons its alleged refusal to cooperate on IAEA demands for more cameras at the Natanz enrichment facility. "Iran's stonewalling of the agency on increased monitoring," he wrote, "has raised agency concerns that its experts might not be able to make sure that some of the enriched material produced at Natanz is not diverted for potential weapons use."

Unfortunately for that argument, however, IAEA officials revealed Aug. 20 that Iran had already agreed the previous week to allow increased IAEA monitoring of the Natanz enrichment facility through additional cameras.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist with Inter-Press Service specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam", was published in 2006.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Yellowstone Drift:
Floating the Past
in Real Time
by John Holt
Introduction by Doug Peacock

Click here to Buy!

Spell Albuquerque:
Memoir of a
"Difficult Student"
By Tennessee Reed

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

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

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont