Today's Stories

April 10 / 12, 2009

Chris Floyd
Hope Abandoned: Obama Protects CIA Torture Memos

April 9, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Decade of Darkness

Patrick Cockburn
What It Would Take to Mend Fences with Islam

Stephen Soldz
Caught on Tape: Diagnostic Abuse of Veterans

P. Sainath
The Rise of the Shoe-cide Bomber

Ellen Cantarow
Israel's Master Plan for Transfer

Gareth Porter /
Jim Lobe
Obama and Israel's Threat to Strike Iran

Jeremy Scahill
How Many Democrats Will Stand Up Against Obama's Bloated Military Budget?

Jerry Kroth
Saving GM From Bankruptcy--With the Stroke of a Pen

Binoy Kampmark
Fujimori Convicted: A Measure of Justice in Latin America

Fidel Castro
My Meeting with the Black Caucus

Website of the Day
Bird Song Radio

April 8, 2009

John Prados
The Af-Pak Paradox

Bill Moyers /
Michael Winship
Changing the Rules of the Blame Game

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Tooth Fairy and the Defense Budget

Russell Mokhiber
PBS Lashes Back

Kathy Sanborn
Depression Fury

Rev. William E. Alberts
If the Shoe Fits: Bush and Al-Zaidi

James McEnteer Rashomon and the Binghamton Shooter: the Rush to Interpret Jiverly Wong's "Statement"

Nadia Hijab
Olmert's Nightmare

Adam Turl
Card Check on the Ropes

Kevin Zeese
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire

Website of the Day
Walk Score Your Neighborhood

April 7, 2009

David Price
Counterinsurgency's Free Ride

Uri Avnery
Who's the Boss?

Chris Floyd
Talking Peace in Prague, Dropping Bombs in Pakistan

Winslow T. Wheeler Defense Cuts: Gates and the System

Marjorie Cohn
Prosecuting the Bush Torture Team: Spain Leads the Way

Dean Baker
Hands Off Social Security

Diana Johnstone
NATO, Strasbourg and the Black Block

Dave Lindorff
Politicizing Accounting

Martha Rosenberg
Life on HBO's Factory Hog Farm

Evelyn Pringle
Motherhood and the Psycho-Pharmaceutical Complex

Website of the Day
Gaza: Closed Zone

April 6, 2009

Michael Hudson
The IMF Rules the World

Andy Worthington Bagram: Guantánamo's Dark Mirror

Ray McGovern
Profiles in Cowardice: Eric Holder and Colin Powell

Deepak Tripathi
The Pakistan Enigma

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Financial Rescue Plan: a Glide-Path to Destitution

Norman Solomon
Meet the New Escalators: the Democrats and the Afghan War

Jonathan Cook
Israel Railways Accused of Racism in Firing of Arab Workers

Judith Bello
Justice for the Developmentally Disabled

Deena Metzger Blackwater in Liberia

Dr. M. Kamiar
"There's No 'Eye' in Iran:" Obama's Pronunciation Problem

Website of the Day
Prison Talk

April 3-5, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
From Twin Towers to Twin Camelots

Kathy Kelly /
Brian Terrall
Getting a Closer Look at the Killer Drones

Sue Sturgis
Fooling with Disaster? Startling Revelations About Three Mile Island Raise New Doubts Over Nuclear Plant Safety

Peter Morici
Girding for a Depression

Kathy Sanborn
Homeless in Tent City, USA

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction?

Rob Larson
Subprime Supreme Court: The Roberts Court Has Become a Powerful New Tool for Business

Saul Landau
Biden and Nixon: a Tale of Two Latin American Experiences

Steve Early
An Evening with Andy Stern

John Goekler
Was Gaza Israel's Waterloo?

Rannie Amiri
Arab League Reconciliation Summit a Bust

Dave Lindorff
Hooray for Juries! A Courtroom Victory for Ward Churchill and Academic Free Speech

Lee Ballinger
Sound Garden: Tom Morello at the Grammy Museum

Ron Jacobs
Artifacts for Survival

David Macaray
AIG Plays the Sympathy Card

John Wight
G20: Capital's New World Symphony

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Race in the Obama Era

Mychal Bell
Surviving Jena Six

Missy Beattie
Hoop Hopes, War and Peace

Reza Fiyouzat
The Iran/US Rapproachment Dance

Michael Boldin
The War on Drugs is a War on You

Christopher Brauchli
The Pope's Batting 50-50

Charles R. Larson
Too Much Stuff

Susie Day
Bernie Breakout Shocker!!

Stephen Martin
Gordon Brown's Chicken Run at the G20

Kim Nicolini
"Last House on the Left:" Vigilantes of the Bourgeoisie

David Yearsley
Homage to Moog and Mallards

Phyllis Pollack
An Interview with Legendary Rock Producer Chris Kimsey on Working with the Stones, Ronnie Wood, Jimmy Cliff, Peter Tosh and Saint Jude

Poets' Basement
Foley, Valentine and Kozak

Website of the Day
The Corner Store

April 2, 2009

Robert Weissman
What If Obama Had Treated Detroit Like Wall Street?

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
A G20 Meeting for Naught

George Bisharat
Israel's Impunity Must End

Russell Mokhiber
Something is Rotten at PBS

Franklin Lamb
Has Washington Lost Lebanon?

Gareth Porter
Settling Scores in Iraq: Maliki Draws US Troops into Crackdown on Sunni Rivals

David Macaray
Obama and the Ruling Class: "Only the Little People Pay Taxes"

Chris Genovali
B.C.'s Bloody Grizzly Hunt

Sam Smith
The Politics of Adulation

Suzan Mazur
Is Neo-Darwinism Dead?

Website of the Day
Fighting for Change in St. Louis

April 1, 2009

Chris Floyd
Surging Further Into the Afghan Abyss

Stanley Heller
Israeli War Crimes: Thank God, It Was Only Rumors

Mark Brenner, Mischa Gaus and Jane Slaughter Obama's Perilous Plan for Detroit: Restructure the Big 3, But Not With Bankruptcy

Jonathan Cook
The Slow Demise of Ehud Olmert

Eric Walberg
EU in Tatters: Only the Protesters Have Any Vision

Richard Morse
Why Haiti Can't Forget Its Past

Don Fitz
Guess Who Came to Dinner with a Match? Green Mayoral Candidate's Van Firebombed in St. Louis

Laray Polk
Texas and Evolution

Belén Fernández
12 Años de Soledad?

Harvey Wasserman
Cracking the Media Silence on Three Mile Island

Website of the Day
Pentagon Fraud Investigations Fell, While Contracts Soared

March 31, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Deception Tango

Peter Lee
Ghosts in the Machine: the World's Hottest Cyberwar Battlefield

Nicholas Dearden
A New Global Debt Crisis

Dave Lindorff
The Obama Betrayal

Joanne Mariner
"We'll Make You See Death"

Ron Jacobs
Obama's Pakistan Gambit

Wiliam S. Lind
Another Lost War

David Michael Green
Who Says the GOP Doesn't Have a Plan?

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Elections in the Americas

Johnny Barber
Meditation in Orange

Dedrick Muhammad
Economic Inequality: the Foundation of the Racial Divide

Website of the Day
How the Obama Dems Took Over the Peace Movement

March 30, 2009

Michael Hudson
Financing the Empire: Do US Face G20 Mutiny?

Patrick Cockburn
What Next in Afghanistan?

Henry A. Giroux
Hard Lessons

Mike Whitney
Where's Eliot Spitzer Now That We Need Him?

Ralph Nader
Where's All the Money Coming From?

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's War on the (Upper) Middle Class

Jeremy Scahill
The Logistical Nightmare in Iraq

Robert Bryce
The Cellulosic Ethanol Delusion

Jonathan Cook
Remembering Land Day in Palestine

Ray McGovern
Obama Bombs

Website of the Day
Hersh: Syria Calling

March 27-29, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Fall Guy

Arno J. Mayer
Too Big to Fail?

Michael Hudson
How the Scam Works

José Pertierra
Gesture for Gesture: How to Free the Cuban Five

Andy Worthington
A Letter to Obama From a Guantánamo Uighur

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Hog Wallow

Winslow T. Wheeler
What Does an F-22 Cost?

Souad N. Al-Azzawi
Iraq: Let the Numbers Speak for Themselves

Dave Lindorff
A Financial History Lesson

Ian Masters
The Zombie Presidency

Barbara Rose Johnston
Water Culture Wars

Jami Tarn
Smearing Tristan Anderson

Diane Farsetta
The Nuclear Industry Targets Wisconsin

David Ker Thomson Against Democracy

Ramzy Baroud
Netanyahu and the Future of the Peace Process

Rannie Amiri
Saudi Shiites' One-Word Demand

Wajahat Ali
Writer as Fighter: the Genius of Ishmael Reed

Nick Egnatz
Whatever Happened to the Fierce Urgency of Now?

Gregory A. Burris
The Insolents Abroad: a Defense of Iceland

Missy Beattie
This Land

Stephen Martin
The Broken Stone of Corporatism

Charles R. Larson
Obama, Smoking and Me

David Yearsley
How They Built Bach's Face (Is the Bard Next?)

Ben Sonnenberg
Won't You Please Get Thee Behind Me? Buñuel's Simon of the Desert

Kim Nicolini
The Mafia Without Moralizing: Garrone's Gomorrah

Lorenzo Wolff
Pat Boone Syndrome

Poets' Basement
Four Poems by Paulann Petersen

Website of the Weekend
Ann Coulter: a Portrait by Ben Tripp

March 26, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Is the Bail Out Breeding a Bigger Crisis?

Sharon Smith
Another Blow to Labor ... from the Democrats

Neve Gordon
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's Shame

Patrick Madden
Why the Geithner Plan Will Fail

Gareth Porter
The Big Con on Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Why Do We Need a Health Insurance Industry?

Hannah Safran
The Israeli Resistance: "Ready to be Traitors"

Keith Newell
Will the Cellphone Please Take the Stand?

Todd Chretien
Behind the Green Collar

Nelson P. Valdés
When It Comes to Cuba and the Media Anything Goes

Website of the Day
G20 Meltdown

March 25, 2009

Robin Blackburn
Media Revolution or Mirage?

Conn Hallinan
Europe in Crisis

David Rosen
Sexting: a First Amendment Challenge for Obama

Jonathan Cook
Turkey's Fallout with Israel Deals Blow to Settlers

Dean Baker
Billions More for Failed Banks

Ron Jacobs
Karzai on a String

Russell Mokhiber
Corporate Liberals vs. Single-Payer

David Macaray
Slice and Dice on Card Check

Dave Lindorff
Geithner's Power Grab

Sarah Knopp
LA Teacher's Sit-In Over Layoffs

Website of the Day
How to Create an Animal Rights "Terrorist"

March 24, 2009

Robert Sandels
Obama and Cuba: Real Change or Minor Tweaks?

Harvey Wasserman
People Died at Three Mile Island

Franklin Lamb
Who Tried to Kill Palestinian Ambassador Abass Zaki and Why?

Michael Donnelly
Obama's Team of Losers

Norman Solomon
Denial and Evasion on Afghanistan

Elizabeth Schulte
The Stark Facts About Violence Against Women

John Goekler
The Most Dangerous Person in the World?

Nicole Colson
Is Justice Finally in Sight for Sami Al-Arian?

Global Balkans
NATO's 78-Day Bombing of Yugoslavia: Ten Years On

William S. Lind
Cat-and-Mouse Off Hainan Island

Website of the Day
Video: IDF Fired on Medics in Gaza

March 23, 2009

M. Shahid Alam
Capitalism From the Standpoint of Its Victims

Uri Avnery
Israel's Most Revolting Law?

Mike Whitney
Zombie Economics: Judgment Day for Geithner

Ralph Nader
Bush the Teacher

Brian Cloughley
Tilting at Afghan Windmills

Dave Lindorff
Toxic Bailouts

Amira Hass
The Rules of Engagement in Gaza: Open Fire on Rescuers

Chris Irwin
When Nonprofit Groups Go Bad

Binoy Kampmark
The Celebrity of Celebrity

Michael Dickinson
Tollbridge Over Troubled Waters

Website of the Day
State of the Birds

March 20-22, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
On the Edge of the Volcano

Paul Craig Roberts
When Things Fall Apart

P. Sainath
Slumdogs vs. Billionaires

Robert Weissman
Lessons From AIG

Saul Landau
Sliding Down in Anger: If We Bail Out the Banks, Why Shouldn't We Own Them?

David Michael Green
Obama and the Altar of Greed

Greg Moses
Winter Soldiers Come to Texas

Ron Jacobs
Pakistan in Turmoil: an Interview with Farooq Tariq

Michael D. Yates
A Nation of Immigrants

John V. Whitbeck
Happy New Year, Iran!

Andy Worthington
The Case of Ahmed Zuhair

Linn Washington Jr.
Supreme Test: the Latest Twist in the Mumia Case

David Ker Thomson
Actions: Things to Do Instead of Hailing the Chief

Laurent Jacque
Is the Euro Doomed?

Rannie Amiri
The Middle East's Jittery Monarchies

Reiko Redmonde /
Larry Everest
The Cold-Blooded Murder of Oscar Grant

David Macaray
The Myth of the Powerful Teachers' Union

Kenneth Couesbouc
Where has the Consumption Gone?

Martha Rosenberg
Meltdown in the Drug Industry

Alan Farago
The Recession, the Developers and Baseball

Missy Beattie
Still Waiting for Change

Richard Rhames
Invisible But Not Completely Insolvent

Stephen Martin
Barack and the Jets

Charles R. Larson
Impeach Obama!

David Yearsley
On Bach's Birthday

Lorenzo Wolff
Manic Levity

Poets' Basement
Three Poems by Gary Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Teachers for CEO Merit Pay!

March 19, 2009

Dave Marsh
Sir Bono: the Knight Who Fled From His Own Debate

Paul Craig Roberts
Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

Mike Whitney
Why Business is Hysterical About Card Check (And Why America Needs It)

Sam Smith
The Economy in Two Eras of Democrats

Harvey Wasserman
The Crash of France's Nuclear Poster Child

Binoy Kampmark
Back Into NATO: the End of French Exceptionalism

Kathy Sanborn
Broken Culture: the Desecration of Iraq's Art Treasures

Christopher Brauchli
Taxing Problems

George Wuerthner
Permanent Damage From Temporary Logging Roads

Diann Rust-Tierney
New Mexico Abolishes the Death Penalty

Website of the Day
Bailout Plan: "Cross Your Fingers and Hope"

March 18, 2009

Michael Hudson
The Real AIG Conspiracy

Paul Craig Roberts
Israel's American Chattel

Nelson P. Valdés
Why Obama's New Cuba Rules Violate the Constitution

Jonathan Cook
Bedouin Villages Left in the Dark Ages

John Ross
The Death of the American Newspaper

Yifat Susskind
Where Are We Leaving Iraqi Women?

Dave Lindorff
Who's Calling the Shots Now?

Frances Moore Lappé
The City That Ended Hunger

Richard Grossman
Beware the Madoff Diversion!

Rev. William E. Alberts
On Being Whole Not Holy

Website of the Day
Three Weeks in Cuba: a Painter's Perspective

March 17, 2009

Michael Hudson
Mr. Bernanke Spreads the Fire

James G. Abourezk
Show Business: AIG and the Posturing Democrats

Harry Browne
Ireland's Blast From the Past

Joanne Mariner
U.S. Human Rights Abuses in the War on Terror

Alan Farago
The National Ponzi Scheme

Dean Baker
Getting Lehman Bros. Wrong ... Again

Peter Morici
Cuts for Autoworkers, Bonuses for Derivatives Traders

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Obama and the Empire

Richard Gott
Victory for the Left in El Salvador

Walter Brasch
Dog Mutilations vs. Cosmetics

Website of the Day
Single-Payer Action

March 16, 2009

Pam Martens
Has a Comedian Just Saved America?

Uri Avnery
The Rape of Washington

Mike Whitney
Bernanke's Witness Protection Program

Ralph Nader
Americans Want Justice for Wall Street Crooks

Nikolas Kozloff
Down But Not Out: the Latin American Right

John Walsh
Redbaiting on the Left

Ron Jacobs
A Call for Common Sense

Binoy Kampmark
The Case of Tim K

Stephen Fleischman
Coxey's Army Will March Again!

Christian Christensen
A 25-Year Misunderstanding: Springsteen's "Born in the USA"

Scott Handleman
Shooting Tristan Anderson

Website of the Day
Clean, Green, Sustainable

March 13 / 15, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Parable of the Shopping Mall

Peter Lee
What the Chas Freeman Fight Was Really About

Diana Johnstone
NATO's Global Mission Creep

David Harvey
Is This Really the End of Neoliberalism?

Petrino DiLeo
Inside Obama's Housing Plan: Will Millions be Left Out in the Cold

David Ker Thomson
Tender to the Earth

Eric Ruder
Massacre in Slow Motion: an Interview with Haider Eid on Gaza

Fred Gardner
Cannabidiol Now!

David Yearsley
Music Torture

Saul Landau
How Israel Gives Jews a Bad Name

Laura Carlsen
Drug War Doublespeak

Robert Weissman
We Told You So

John Goekler /
Merle Lefkoff
The Struggle in Saffron

Tom Barry
Imprisoning Immigrants for Profit

Kathy Sanborn
Money Out of Thin Air

Chris Mobley / Leela Yellesetty
Criminalizing Poverty: the Jail Seattle Doesn't Need

David Michael Green
The Perils of Being Right and Wrong

Alan Maass /
Lee Sustar
A Socialist Moment?

Christopher Brauchli
Pity, the Poor Tax Collectors

Richard Morse
Clinton in Haiti

Lorenzo Wolff
Taking It From the Streets: From Springsteen to the Wu-Tang Clan

Poets' Basement
Springate and Johnston

Website of the Weekend
Hear the Buffalo

March 12 , 2009

Sharon Smith
Bottom Feeders at the Trough

Christopher Ketcham
Full Spectrum Penetration: Israeli Spying in the United States

Mike Whitney
Haircut Time for Bondholders

Ray McGovern
Obama Caves to the Lobby

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
The Doublespeak of a Discredited IMF

John Ross
The War is Not Over

M. Reza Pirbhai
Men in Black: Another View of Pakistan

Chris Floyd
Lost Liberty Blues: Prisons, Profits and the Banality of Evil

Steve Early
Why Labor Doesn't Need a "House of Lords"

Quentin Gee
Hiding the Costs of Coal

Website of the Day
Amadee Coral Reef: a Spherical Panorama

March 11 , 2009

Mike Roselle
From Birmingham to Coal River: Why is the Environmental Movement So Timid?

Paul Craig Roberts
The Criminal Injustice System

Henry A. Giroux
Academic Labor in Dark Times

Nikolas Kozloff
The Death Cries of the Salvadoran Right

Norm Kent
I am Patient Number 380206011

Mitu Sengupta
Reforming the World Bank: Different Image, Same Tune?

Ludwig Watzal
The Structure of Israel's Occupation

David Macaray
The Battle Over EFCA Has Begun

William S. Lind
Rounding Up the Usual Suspects

Martha Rosenberg
A Merger From the Folks Who Brought You Vytorin

Website of the Day
American Indicator: One in Fifty Kids are Homeless

March 10 , 2009

Franklin Spinney
What Israeli Peace Process?

Vijay Prashad
What Did Hillary Clinton Do?

Stan Cox
There's No Free Lunch on Your Browser: the Internet's Energy Drain

Zoltan Grossman
Coffee Strong: Listening to the G.I. Voice at Fort Lewis

Reuven Kaminer
Pure and Unadulterated Racism

Jonathan Cook
Memoricide in the West Bank

Dave Lindorff
Business Rules

Brian McKenna
How Anthropology Disparages Journalism

Harvey Wasserman
Is This the End of the Age of the Automobile?

Corey Pein
He Told You So

Website of the Day
AIG and Systemic Failure: $1.6 Trillion in Insured Deriviatives

March 9 , 2009

Pam Martens
Madoff and the Sorkin Affair

Ralph Nader
Too Big...Period

Peter Lee
Meet Gulbuddin Hekmatyar: the US's Worst/Best Hope for Afghanistan?

Mike Whitney
Geithner's Charade

Peter Morici
Fixing the Banks: Treasury's Doomed Strategy

Dean Baker
Why Do We Need a Private Health Insurance Industry, Anyway?

Steve Ault
Kiss Thailand's Tolerance for Gays Goodbye

Stephen Lendman
Guantánamo Under Obama

Farooq Sulehria
Tennis Without Spectators

Belén Fernández
Chávez, a Cockfight and the Caracazo

Website of the Day
How Lincoln Learned to Read

March 6-8 , 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Harlots High and Low

Chris Floyd
Tangled Up in Karl

Uri Avnery
Remember Ophira?

Dave Lindorff
Kiss the Banks Goodbye

Mark Weisbrot
The Crisis vs. the Dogma

David Ker Thomson
Against Work

Phil Aliff
Soldier Suicides

Rebekah Ward
Georgia Injustice: Another Young Life Wrecked

Tracey Briggs
How Capitalism Feels in the Head

Dean Baker
Depression Nostalgia?

Daniel P. Wirt, M.D.
Remove the Handle From the Health Insurance Misery and Death Pump

Carl Finamore
The Recovery Plan: Save Us From Those Who Would Save Us

Wajahat Ali
The Pakistani Monster

David Michael Green
Smart is the New Stupid

David Macaray
The Minimum Wage Revisited

Michael Dickinson
On Financial Fools Day

Susie Day
Line in the Sand

Bob Sommer
Echoes of the Townhouse Explosion

Ben Sonnenberg
No Forgiveness for the Bourgeoisie: Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel"

David Yearsley
Sonic Fakery in "Slumdog" From the Mozart of Chennai

DC Larson
They're Writing Those Depression Songs, Again

Lorenzo Wolff
Live Truth: Music Sans Headphones

Poets' Basement
Dominquez, MacNeil and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Environment & Obama: a Conversation with Jeffrey St. Clair

March 5 , 2009

James G. Abourezk
This Time It's Mrs. Clinton's Turn

Kathleen and Bill Christison
U.S. Military Aid to Israel

Robert Weissman
Wall Street's Best Investment: Paying for Public Policy

Patrick Cockburn
My Day at the Terror "Charity"

William Blum
Being Serious About Torture...Or Not

Robert Fantina
From Iraq to Afghanistan: Augmentation All Over Again

Saul Landau
The Unseen Crisis

Benjamin Dangl
Striking a Blow Against the Beer Cartel: a Grassroots Victory in Utah

Christopher Brauchli
The New Leaders of the GOP

Website of the Day
The Angola 3: 36 Years of Solitude

March 4, 2009

Marjorie Cohn
Blueprints for a Police State

Mike Whitney
Blowing Up the Economy: How Securitization Lit the Fuse

Ron Jacobs
The Banality of Occupation: the Rand Papers

Ashley Smith
War by Another Name

Joanne Mariner
Obama's War on Terror

Dan Bacher
The California Water Wars: Why It's Not a Conflict Between Fish and People

Mark Engler
Will the Winds of Change Reach El Salvador?

Franklin Lamb
"What's Hezbollah Done for Us Lately?"

Cal Winslow
Slugging It Out in California

David Mandelzys
Apartheid Week

Website of the Day
Guantánamo: the Definitive Prisoner List

March 3, 2009

Conn Hallinan
Ethnic Cleansing and Israel

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Long, Dark Night of Pakistan

Brian M. Downing
The Changing Game in Afghanistan

Robert Larson
External Damnation: Companies are Designed for Destruction

Daniel P. Wirt, MD
Single-Payer Health Reform

Russell Mokhiber
Burn Your Health Insurance Bill!

William Loren Katz
Obama, One Ape and Two Newspapers

Kathy Sanborn
The Lazy Man's Guide to the Economic Crisis

Pauline Imbach
A New Start for the World Social Forum?

Christopher Ketcham
The Best Journalism You'll Write is Priceless

Website of the Day
The Surveillance Self-Defense Project

March 2, 2009

Andrea Peacock
A Poisoned Town's Shot at Justice

Paul Craig Roberts
Obama's Budget

Peter Lee
Pakistan Lurches Toward the Abyss

John Blair
Locking Down Big Coal

Peter Morici
Treasury's Flawed Plan for Citigroup

Uri Avnery
10 Ways to Kill Fatah

Michael Donnelly
Resistance to the War on the Wild

Fred Gardner
The Judge Who Ruled Marijuana is Medicine

Sonia Nettnin
Middle East Medical Mission Heroes

Andrew Lehman
A New Deal for the Web

Website of the Day
Pentagon Papers II?

Eric Holder and the Whitewashing of Racism

Tom Barry
Napolitano's Hard Line

Harvey Wasserman
Obama's Excellent Atomic Omission

Adam Turl
The Enemies of Unions and the Lies They Tell

David Macaray
When People are Fired Illegally

James McEnteer
Rush to the Rescue: Limbaugh's Secret Plan to Save the Economy

Website of the Day
The Carbon Casino

Weekend Edition
April 10 / 12, 2009

The Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Savage Incongruities

By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

On November 24 1945, the American photographer Lee Miller walked into the newly liberated Buchenwald death camp. Dead bodies were stacked in rotting mounds. The furnaces that had burned human flesh were still warm to her touch. The stench of shit and death clotted the air. The living dead remained in their metal beds too frail to move.

The Nazi guards were there, too. Some were confined in holding pens. Another guard awaited his execution, after being beaten to a pulp by dozens of frail internees. In Miller's photo, his fractured nose stabs through his skin, as he stares beyond the camera with vacant eyes. Another camp guard was strung up from a lamppost and, like Mussolini, his body pummeled into a grotesque mess of flesh. Another Nazi was shot in the head and dumped in a stream, his body sheathed in reeds like a dead carp. Miller, the former fashion model, moved through it all, capturing the first startling images of the death camps with the unsparing lens her Leica.

Miller sent back to New York from that scene of unspeakable horror some of the most disturbing photographs to come out World War II: pictures of cruelty and retaliation, survival and compassion, life and death amid the ruins of a Europe gone mad. The images derive power not only from the shocking content, but also from the craft of their composition, which recall scenes from the crueler fantasies of Bosch. The images seemed otherworldly, fantastical, a cruel dream. At the same time, there was no denying their reality. When the images appeared in (of all venues) Vogue magazine, they ran under the headline "Believe It!"

Lee Miller made a career out of compelling people, often upper middle class women like herself, to believe the impossible, to confront the dark dreamworld of life in the 20th Century. From Buchenwald Miller went to Dachau. She photographed the sad varieties of death along the way, including a hauntingly erotic photo a blond teenage girl, as beautiful as Miller herself, wrapped in her father's Nazi jacket, laying on a couch. She'd been forced by her father to commit suicide prior to the arrival of the allied troops. The photograph has the repulsive allure of a painting of a martyred saint, but we know it's nothing of the kind.

The night after Miller visited Dachau, she and fellow photographer David Scherman (who was also her lover and 20 years her junior) ended up in a partially bombed out villa on the outskirts of Munich. The house turned out to be the Munich residence of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun. Miller asked Sherman to take her picture in Hitler's bathtub. She posed naked in the tub, with a photo of the fuhrer behind her. A few days later Miller arrived at Berchtesgaden in Austria, where she photographed Hitler's mountain chalet as it was consumed by flames.

The landscape Miller traversed in Europe in 1944 and 1945 was that of a bad dream, a waking nightmare. "Germany is a beautiful land dotted with jewel-like villages, blotched with ruined cities and inhabited by schizophrenics," she wrote in a dispatch accompanying her photos. "Little girls in white dresses and garlands promenade after their first communion. The children have stilts and marbles and tops and hoops, and they play with dolls. Mothers sew and sweep and bake, and farmers plough and harrow; all just like real people. But they aren't."

Lee Miller was better equipped than most war photographers of her generation to capture the strange incongruities of this scene. After all, prior to World War II Lee Miller was one of the leading figures in the surrealist movement. She was the lover of Man Ray and had invented the solarization technique that made him famous. She was friends with Dali and Picasso and starred in Jean Cocteau's first film, the surrealist classic Blood of the Poet. Later she married the British surrealist painter Roland Penrose.

Miller was no late-arriving tourist of the war, either. She had been photographing the carnage since the blitz of London, producing thousands of photos of shattered buildings, orphaned children, people getting along with their lives under the nightly terror of the buzzbombs and V-2s. She wanted to follow the British troops in North Africa, where she had spent many years, but the English military didn't allow women photographers on the front. So she stayed in England and got a position working for British Vogue. She covered the air bases and military factories. For a nearly a year, she devoted herself to documenting the new working roles assumed by women in a time of war: operating tractors and heavy machinery, serving as firefighters and boat builders, loggers and pilots. London in the early 1940s was a world-turned upside down, filled with unexpected revelations, as in a Magritte painting."I don't like to photograph horrors," Miller wrote. "But don't think that every town and area isn't rich with them."

Lee Miller was born in Poughkeepsie, New York in 1907 into an odd middle class family. Her father, Theodore, was engineer and inventor. He also dabbled in photography. His favorite subject was Lee Miller and her schoolmates. He photographed his daughter thousands of times, usually naked, often in sexually explicit poses.

Miller was raped at the age of seven, supposedly by a family friend. But the culprit may well have been her father, Theodore. In any event, Lee's mother, Frances, a nurse, responded to this trauma by making it worse. She subjected Lee to regular and excruciatingly painful douches with dichloride of mercury.

In 1925, Miller fled New York and her grim family for Paris, where she studied theater at L'Ecole Medgyes pour la Technique du Theatre. She stayed for six month until her father, anxious to have back by his side in New York, cut off her funds.

The next fall Miller enrolled in the Art Students League in New York City, where she studied set design. On her way to class one day, Miller casually stepped off the curb into oncoming traffic. She was snatched from the murderous path of a taxi by a sharply dressed passerby. That man happened to be Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue.

Nast knew a beautiful face when he saw one and Miller was a striking blond: athletic, smart and adventuresome. He immediately put Miller to work for his magazine as a model and later a photographer. In 1927 her face graced the cover of Vogue in a photo taken by Edward Steicher. The Vogue cover led to other gigs as a model, including the first Kotex ad to feature a photograph of a woman.

Modeling paid the bills, but Miller really aspired to be a writer. Nast sent her to Paris as a correspondent for Vogue in 1929. She was supposed to cover the fashion industry and the Parisian art and social scene. Miller was a skilled writer, but she also suffered from an incapacitating case of writer's block. She would churn out torrents of text, but rarely a complete story. After missing dozens of deadlines, Nast put her to work doing research for Vogue designers.

One of her first assignments was to compile a catalogue of Renaissance gowns for reproduction in a Vogue photoshoot. Miller visited museums and palaces, drawing the samples. But she soon discovered that her skills as a sketch artist were limited, so she began photographing collections from Parisian museums.

So it was in Paris that she sought out another expatriate from New York, Emmanuel Radnitzky: Man Ray. Miller wanted to improve her skills as a photographer, so she showed up at Man Ray's studio one afternoon and demanded to take her on as a student. Man Ray told Miller he wasn't a teacher. "I am here to inspire, not inform," Man Ray said piously. But he didn't blow her off entirely. And as it turned out, Miller became the inspirer. That night they became lovers and lived together on and off for the next three years.

It's hard to say who benefited more from the relationship. Man Ray introduced Miller to the luminaries of the Parisian art scene: Marcel Duchamps, Picasso, Magritte, Cocteau, Max Ernst, Lenora Carrington and, her future husband, Roland Penrose. She later wrote that Man Ray taught her the rudiments of photography: "Fashion pictures, portraits, the whole technique of what he did."

For her part, Miller soon became the surrealist's favorite model. Man Ray photographed her obsessively, often in darkly erotic poses. He even photographed her lounging on the lap of her stiff father in a portrait infused with an unsettling subtext, hinting at incest, longing and steaming hatred. You can see how the dissipated beauty of Miller's face in this strange portrait appealed to Jean Cocteau, the man who would write Les Enfants Terrible.

One day Miller, working in Man Ray's dark room, accidentally exposed a negative plate to light. She and Man Ray were astounded by how this distorted the images, giving them an electric, almost 3-D appearance. They fine-tuned this accidental discovery into a technique called solarization. It brought Man Ray (though not Miller) international acclaim.

Miller was the most sexually and artistically uninhibited American woman to hit the streets of Paris since Josephine Baker. Notoriously, she drove her car topless through the streets of Paris. She posed nude for dozens of painters and sculptors and allowed a mould to be taken of her breast, which was transformed into the most popular champagne glass in Paris.

Like the other surrealists, Man Ray publicly ridiculed marriage and promoted sexual liberationfor himself. Miller took the pompous photographer seriously and flung herself freely into numerous affairs. Man Ray objected. He was free to fuck around at will but she wasn't. He wanted to keep her shackled in one of the oldest modes, as an artistic muse: as confined and immobile as one of the strange statues in a de Chirico painting. When Miller resisted, Man Ray became insanely jealously and violent. In 1930, Miller moved out and opened her own studio, where she exhibited some of her best surrealist photos, including "Man Ray Shaving", "Nude Bent Forward" and "The Exploding Hand".

But Man Ray refused to leave her alone. He trashed her work, bullied her friends, threatened her lovers and stalked her through the streets of Paris.

Eventually, Miller fled to Alexandria, where she fell in with a crowd of British writers and artists that included Lawrence Durrell. The distraught Man Ray responded to Miller's flight by shredding his photographs of Miller and creating his so-called Objects of Destruction. One of the most famous is a metronome with a photo of Miller's eye attached to the pendulum. In 1941, Man Ray left Paris ahead of the Nazis for southern California, where he wound up doing headshots for Hollywood.

In Egypt Miller met up with an old lover, Aziz Eloui Bey, an Egyptian millionaire and art patron. They soon married and Miller became a hostess to bacchanalian parties, many of them with surrealist themes. Freed of Man Ray's oppressiveness and photographic aesthetic, Miller also began to perfect her photographic style: composed, luminous and slightly offbeat. One bizarre photograph from this time is of the British writer Robin Fedden, wearing snow skis and a pith helmet, atop a Saharan dune. Another is the strange and beautiful "Portrait of Space," a view of the desert through a torn screen, which inspired Rene Magritte's painting "Le Baiser." Equally striking is Miller's 1937 photo "The Shadow of the Pyramid", taken from the peak of the Great Pyramid of Giza, showing the dark void of negative space looming across the desert.

Here in Egypt we begin to see the maturation of Miller's art. Increasingly, her subjects are more naturalistic, but the composition is increasingly fractured, a suggesting an increasing influence of the Cubists on her approach to photography.Even in Egypt, Miller didn't lose her fondness for sexual puns. In 1939 Miller took a series of photographs of cliffs and rock outcrops near Siwa. The photos are as austere and descriptive as anything taken Ansel Adams. But Miller learned from the surrealists how a title could completely alter the meaning of a work of art. Hence her photo of a sandstone monolith, which she called "Cock Rock", immediately assumes the resemblance of a mighty, semi-erect phallus.

Eventually, Miller bored of the sheltered life of Egypt and in 1939 she left Cairo for Paris where she threw herself into a torrid affair with the English surrealist painter Roland Penrose. Penrose, also extremely wealthy, was close friends with Max Ernst and Picasso, both of whom painted portraits of Miller. Penrose would later write one of the best critical works on Picasso, who famously said it was so good he could have written it himself. Miller took the photographs for the book.

When war broke out, Miller and Penrose moved to London to a mansion in Hampstead near Sigmund Freud. Penrose was a Quaker and a pacifist, but Miller was gung ho for war. She tried to get accredited as a war photographer by British papers, but the British army refused to allow women to accompany troops into combat. So Miller signed on with British Vogue and soon produced a stunning series of photographs documenting the London Blitz, which was turned into a popular book called Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire, featuring a text by Edward R. Murrow.

When the US entered the war, Miller went back to work for American Vogue and followed the D-Day landings into France. She was no embedded reporter. In fact, during her first week in France, Miller violated orders from the Army and entered the besieged village of St. Malo. She was the only photographer to capture the decimation of this small French town. She also rode into Paris on the day of its liberation.

During these frenzied months, Miller, along with fellow American Margaret Burke-White who had been photographing the war from the Russian Front, helped invent what we now know as photojournalism. Prior to WW II, photographs were used mainly to illustrate long prose dispatches from the likes of Ernie Pyle. But Miller's work from Europe put that tradition on its head. She used a series of photographs linked by small fragments of prose.Her photos of Europe during the war are informed by surrealism but without resorting to its more overt gimmicks. Gone are the contrived camera angles and the darkroom tricks. It's as if she were saying that the images themselves, of senseless death and cultural destruction, are strange enough-to enhance them would be to undermine their reality.

"We've all been conditioned wrong," Miller wrote. "We should have been exposed to nightclubs and sleep-snatching and alarms and excursions to prepare us for this, our life."

Like other war journalists, the battles in Europe ended too soon for Lee Miller. Like Sean Flynn in Vietnam, Miller became addicted to tense reality of war, living on coffee, random violence and benezdrine. She loathed the Germans and opposed reconstruction of the German nation. "A more disorganized, dissolute, dishonest population has never existed in the history books," Miller wrote. She continued on for a few more weeks. One of her final photographs was of the execution of Laszlo Bardossy, the former prime minister of Hungary and fascist collaborator.

When she returned to London, she began to sour on photography. It could never recapture the intensity it had during those feverish days in Europe. She began taking portraits, mainly of friends and painters in relaxed settings. Some of these photographs retain the old power, especially the photos of Picasso. Others seem restrained and mannered.

In the mid-1950s Miller stopped taking photos, refused all interviews and prohibited her works from being shown-- one reason she remains an obscure artist today. She turned her attention to cooking. She began collecting recipes and interviewing chefs from across Europe. There's a strange similarity between the dark room and the kitchen, both are conjurer's arts. It's the kind of career conjuncture that would appeal to the surrealists.

When Miller died in 1970 from cancer, her son Anthony began to excavate her attic. He found more than 500 prints and 40,000 negatives, many of them never seen by anyone other than his mother. Slowly, Penrose has begun the hard work of reassembling his mother's astonishing legacy of work, first in a book, The Lives of Lee Miller, then in a small museum in East Sussex and now in an online archive. The work is far from complete and Miller is yet to receive the kind of critical assessment that she is due. But even so what has been released so far is nothing less than a dramatic reemergence of a buried history of the 20th century as recorded by one of the most unflinching eyes to ever aim a camera lens.

"It's like this," Miller wrote. "Perhaps you haven't noticed. This is how it is."

This essay is slated to appear in the forthcoming book Behind the Lens: Women War Photographers.

Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press / CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. 

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