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Today's Stories June 15, 2007 Andy Worthington The Ordeal of Ali al-Marri John Ross Ballot Burning Time in Ol' Mexico   June 14, 2007 Michael Donnelly Charred SUVs and the End of Citizen Eco-Activism Faisal Kutty Scare Canada: The No-Fly List's False Sense of Security Harry Browne Ireland's Green Party Sells Out Charles Jonkel From the Arctic to Yellowstone: Bears in a World of Indifference Steven Higgs Murder in a Small Town: "Gay Panic" in Indiana? Bruce Dixon Black Power Through Low Power Radio Bruce K. Gagnon What Do We Do Now? A 10-Step Plan for Antiwar Activists Website of the Day Finkelgate June 13, 2007 Glen Ford Obama's Siren Song Marjorie Cohn Repression in Oaxaca Bill Christison A Grave Injustice at DePaul University Silvia Cattori "I Was Not Prepared for the Horrors I Saw": an Interview with Hedy Epstein Richard Gott Racism and TV in Venezuela Firmin DeBrabander How the Neocons Misread Machiavelli William S. Lind The Perfect (Sine) Wave: Bombing Railroad Stations in Iraq Keith Rosenthal Workers Score a Victory at Harvard Website of the Day GOP and Monty Python Explain: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" June 12, 2007 Jeffrey St. Clair How to Sell a War Paul Craig Roberts The Neocon Threat to American Freedom P. Sainath India's Plutocrats and the Press Ralph Nader The Biggest Scam in the World Omar Waraich A Black Day for Pakistan's Press Dave Lindorff Things Your Media Momma Didn't Tell You Harvey Wasserman Confessions of an Anti-Nuke Jerk Malini Johar Schueller It Takes a Bomb Ramzy Baroud War Foretold: Mark Twain and the Sins of Empire Website of the Day Palestinian Chronicle Needs Our Help!   June 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn The War on Journalists Paul Craig Roberts Losing the Economy to Mythology Uri Avnery 40 Bad Years: the Rot of Occupation Norman Solomon The Silence of the Bombs Eva Liddell Paris Hilton Doesn't Do Dishes: How Barbie Stood Up to Allen Ginsberg Rannie Amiri Groundhog Day in Pakistan Rachel Voss Poetry and Politics in Nassau County Christopher Brauchli A Wild West Tale, Starring Rev. Dobson and Bill O'Reilly D. K. Wilson Untangling Michael Vick from the Dogs Website of the Day Paris, Mixed Up June 9 / 10, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Dissidents Against Dogma George Ciccariello-Maher Behind Venezuela's "Student Rebellion": Who's Pulling the Strings? Saul Landau An Interview with Ricardo Alarcon, Vice President of Cuba Robert Fisk Believe It or Not in the Middle East Brian Cloughley Troop Support: Deceptions and Insipid Sentiments Ron Jacobs Condoleezza Rice Names the System Ward Boston Searching for the Truth About the USS Liberty Conn Hallinan Dark Plots in Byzantine Beirut Leonard Peltier The Ongoing War on Native American Religious Practices Lawrence Davidson Israel's New Anti-Boycott Task Force John Ross Mass Nude-In Complicates Church-State Scuffling in Mexico Kate Allan Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing Fred Gardner Ignorance Marches On Stephen Fleischman Little Boy, Fat Man and Iran Monica Benderman Reading Tom Paine in a Time of Crisis Geoff Bailey A Real Oil Conspiracy: Gouged at the Pump Missy Beattie Faith and War Patrick Dyer A Democrat Revs Up Ohio's Death Machine Tim Lengerich Dispelling the Cowboy Myth: an Interview with George Wuerthner James Irani and David Rahni Perspectives on the Arrests of Iran-Americans in Tehran Gary Leupp The Unfair Treatment of Paris Hilton Michael Tillery The Heart of a Sportswriter: an Interview with David Aldridge Michael Simmons Beating Off the Squares: the Hipness of Anton Rosenberg Poets' Basement Laymon, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend This is Sea Shepherd!   June 8, 2007 Serge Halimi What Sarkozy Learned About Politics from the US Patrick Cockburn The Turkish Incursion Jeffrey St. Clair Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty, Revisited   Paul Craig Roberts The Secret War William Blum What If NBC Cheered on a Military Coup Against Bush? Joshua Frank Swing-State Strategy: Looking for a Spoiler Lance Selfa How the Six Day War Changed the Middle East Dave Lindorff A "Criminal Conspiracy" in the White House Lawrence Ferlinghetti The Summer of Love: Flashbacks of a Human Be-In Website of the Day Robert Pollin: "Making the Federal Minimum Wage a Living Wage" June 7, 2007 Marjorie Cohn The Prison is the War Crime Soldz, Reisner and Olson: A Q & A on Psychologists and Torture Soldz, Reisner and Olson, et al: An Open Letter to Sharon Brehm, President of the American Psychological Association Paul Craig Roberts Losing Iraq, Nuking Iran Bill Quigley "How Long Must We Support a Mistake?" Silvia Cattori Sailing to Gaza Carl G. Estabrook What the June Bug Is: Politics in the Dismal Season Ellen Taylor Free the Tweakers!: The Good News About Meth Corporate Crime Reporter BAE Systems, Prince Bandar and the $2 Billion Account at the Riggs Bank Brenda Norrell Torture Training at Ft. Huachuca: Two Priests Face Prison for Exposing Torture in Arizona D. K. Wilson What Gary Sheffield Really Said Kevin Zeese Iraq Occupation Coming to a Head Over Oil Website of the Day How the Press Expired June 6, 2007 Alain Gresh Countdown to War on Iran Gary Leupp Poddy's Crazy Prayer: Bomb Iran, For Israel and America! Steven Sherman The Perils of Humanitarian Intervention Bruce Dixon Is Bill Gates Trying to Hijack Africa's Food Supply? Corporate Crime Reporter The Professor and the Nukes Brian M. Downing The Iraq War and Presidential Politics Ron Jacobs Luv n' Hate: a Different Take on the Summer of Love George Bisharat The Mirage of the Two State Solution Nicole Colson Over to You, Dante: Falwell's Ministry of Hate Bruce K. Gagnon From Italy to Guam: A Global Peace Movement is Taking Shape Website of the Day How the Democrats Should Treat Bush   June 5, 2007 Michael Neumann Canada in Afghanistan Jonathan Cook The Shin Bet and the Persecution of Azmi Bishara David Vest The Democrats' War Robert Fantina America's Cuba Policy Hoffman, Parsneau and Chowdhury CounterTerrorism as International Healthcare John V. Walsh Shaming the Official Antiwar Movement Richard Cretan Yellow Dog: The Strange Love of Martin Amis and Tony Blair Adam Engel Days of Dread: an American Tale William S. Lind The News from Anbar: Has Al Qaeda Over-Reached? Myles Hoenig Free the Oaks! Cut Down Those Yellow Ribbons! Jim Minick Lead-Foot Nation Website of the Day Punk Rock Soap Opera June 4, 2007 Nizar Latif An Interview with Moqtada al-Sadr Diana Johnstone Sarko and the Ghosts of May, 1968 Gregory Wilpert RCTV and Freedom of Speech in Venezuela Paul Watson The Anchorage Whale Killing Bureaucrats Summit Susan Rosenthal, MD How Cindy Sheehan Unmasked the Democrats Richard Ward The Right of Return to New Orleans Eva Liddell Don't Support the Troops Zahi Khouri Four Decades of Occupation Evelyn Pringle The FDA, GlaxoSmithKline and the Avandia Disaster China Hand About Those North Korean Benjamin Franklins ... Karyn Strickler George W. Bush: a "Ficeist" Leader Website of the Day The Guantanamo Files   June 2 / 3, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Last of the Texas Outsiders Marc Levy Iraq Dead Ahead: a Brief Military History and Civilian Guide to Arlington National Cemetery Martin Smith Camilo Mejía's War: From Foot Soldier for Empire to Rebel for Peace Diana Johnstone Great Power Meddling in Kosovo John Ross The Oaxaca Volcano Stews Uri Avnery On Generals and Admirals Sunsara Taylor This is Not a Story About Cindy Sheehan Richard Neville Were the Hippies Right? P. Sainath The Farm Crisis and 100,000 Indian Widows Missy Comley Beattie Let's Roar Nisrine Abiad and Victor Kattan The Hariri Tribunal: a Fait Accompli? Rannie Amiri Lebanon, Bush and the Three Stooges Margot Pepper Deconstructing "Return to Sender" Eric Stewart Censorship and Cop Brutality in the New Bison Wars Ralph Nader The Halberstam Camp Dan Bacher A Victory for the Fish Shaun Harkin and Sandy Boyer Irish War Protesters on Trial Richard Rhames Selling Five Acres in Crawford Frederick Hudson The Rediscovery of Ella Fitzgerald Poets' Basement Lindorff, Landau and Buknatski Website of the Weekend Gimme Shelter June 1, 2007 Dave Marsh The FBI and the Godfather (of Soul): James Brown's FBI Files Saul Landau Return to Cuba: 47 Years Later in Havana David Phinney How the Baghdad Embassy Was Built: Forced Labor and Worker Abuse Robert Jensen The Bigot and the Boycott Stanley Heller Arrest Robert McNamara Yifat Susskind Indigenous Women Fight Back Robert Weissman Corporate Power Since 1980 Paul Buchheit Africa and Its Discontents William S. Lind The Folly of Maximalist Objectives Sherwood Ross 78,000 Iraqis Have Been Killed by Coalition Airstrikes Stephen Lendman Terrorism Defined Website of the Day Desert Autonomous Zone

June 15, 2007 Another Legal Blow to the Bush Administration The Ordeal of Ali al-Marri By ANDY WORTHINGTON There used to be a belief – no doubt Attorney General Alberto Gonzales would describe it as “quaint” – that people accused of a crime were presumed innocent until proven guilty. That was in the olden days, however, before the world-changing events of 9/11, after which, according to the powers that the President of the United States granted himself in November 2001, anyone he regarded with suspicion – almost exclusively Muslims, as it turned out – could be declared guilty without the need for such outmoded legal relics as the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial. The prison at Guantánamo is full of these new types of human beings – “illegal enemy combatants,” guilty “unpeople” imprisoned forever at the President’s whim – as are other US-run prisons around the world, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Diego Garcia and the Horn of Africa. Some are hidden in prisons in other countries – “friendly” regimes who are “with us” in the “War on Terror,” including Libya, a country run by a man who resembles, but clearly is not the Colonel Gaddafi who was once our sworn enemy – where they can be subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” without American operatives having to lift a finger to incriminate themselves in their “interrogation.” On Monday 11 June, the case of one of these “unpeople” – a Qatari named Ali al-Marri, a rather special example who was captured in the United States – was scrutinized by a panel of Fourth Circuit judges, who were deciding whether the President had the right to have kept this man imprisoned without trial for five and a half years. To an untrained eye – perhaps one belonging to those of us who still believe in due process – the facts in al-Marri’s case are difficult to discern with any certainty, beyond the documented evidence relating to his movements between September 2001 and the present day. A legal US resident – though not a citizen – al-Marri had studied computer science at Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois in 1991, and returned on 10 September 2001 to pursue post-graduate studies, bringing his family – his wife and five children – with him. Three months later he was arrested and charged with fraud and making false statements to the FBI, but in June 2003, a month before he was due to stand trial for these charges in a federal court in Peoria, the prosecution dropped the charges and informed the court that he was to be held as an “enemy combatant” instead. Held incommunicado in a military brig in Charleston, South Carolina, he was not allowed to meet representatives of the International Red Cross until August 2004, and was not allowed legal counsel until October 2004, when Mark Berman of Gibbons, Del Deo, Dolan, Griffinger & Vecchione took on his case. Since November 2005, when another American “enemy combatant,” Jose Padilla, was indicted on criminal charges unrelated to the alleged terrorist plot for which he was originally seized in May 2002, al-Marri has had the dubious distinction of being the only “enemy combatant” on the US mainland. On Monday, al-Marri’s ongoing legal limbo was finally addressed when the Fourth Circuit judges ruled, by 2-1, that the President no longer had the right to hold him without charge or trial. “Put simply, the Constitution does not allow the President to order the military to seize civilians residing within the United States and then detain them indefinitely without criminal process,” the court said, “and this is so even if he calls them 'enemy combatants’.” Like the recent debacle of the Military Commissions, this was a painful blow for an administration clinging to its belief in the Presidential prerogative to create “enemy combatants” at will. To bolster its extra-legal case, the charges against al-Marri had been widely publicized by the administration over the previous four years. The presidential order which declared him an “enemy combatant” stated that he was closely associated with al-Qaeda and presented “a continuing, present, and grave danger to the national security of the United States,” and at various times he has been accused of having connections to the al-Qaeda financier Mustafa al-Hawsawi, of working as an al-Qaeda sleeper agent in the US, of having pledged to Osama bin Laden that he would kill Americans, and of having documents related to jihadi activities on his computer, including information on hydrogen cyanide (used in chemical weapons), lectures by Osama bin Laden and a cartoon of planes crashing into the World Trade Center. These allegations may or may not be true, but those of us in the “quaint” old world of due process believe the Fourth Circuit judges were absolutely correct to conclude that the mind of Bush alone was not the appropriate place to make these decisions. In the simple Manichean world of the President and his supporters, however, the judges’ decision is apparently something akin to high treason. Those whose opinions are as clear-cut as the President’s include Bradford Berenson, one of eight associate counsels during Alberto Gonzales' tenure as White House counsel, who complained in the Wall Street Journal that, “fueled by the 1960s rights revolution, the post-civil rights era celebration of judicial power, and the suspicion and distrust of executive power and military authority after Watergate and the Vietnam War,” the “pendulum” of the federal courts was “now swinging too far in the other direction.” Berenson proceeded to describe al-Marri in terms of such rigorous certitude that I can only conclude that he was reading the President’s mind: “Mr Marri is a member of al-Qaeda who trained at Osama bin Laden's terrorist training camp in Afghanistan. In the summer of 2001, he met with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and then traveled to the U.S. just prior to those attacks to serve as an al-Qaeda sleeper agent. The government believes he was intended to be part of a second wave of attacks on our country and was researching ways to disrupt the US financial system. After he was arrested, the government searched his computer and found materials relating to chemical weapons, jihad, and al-Qaeda, as well as 1,000 credit-card numbers.” To Mr Berenson – and his idols in the government – I can only say: Ali al-Marri may be all of these things, but we need lawyers, judges and juries to figure that out, not self-declared clairvoyants with an iron belief in unfettered executive power. Andy Worthington (www.andyworthington.co.uk) is a British historian, and the author of ‘The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison’ (to be published by Pluto Press in October 2007). He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

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