Today's Stories

November 20, 2008

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

November 11, 2008

James G. Abourezk
How to Vote Against Your Own Interests

Allan J. Lichtman
What Obama Can Learn From FDR

Eric Toussaint
Financing the Bailout: a Holy Union for a Deuce of a Swindle

Ron Jacobs
Moving Beyond Hope: a Leftist Looks at the Near Future

Peter Montague
Green Coal?

Corporate Crime Reporter
BP's Big Spill on the North Slope

Laura Carlsen
Latin America Sends Obama a Piece of Its Mind

Col. Dan Smith
A New Unifying Paradigm?

Morton Skorodin
The Machine Grinds On

David Michael Green
My Michelle Moment

Charles R. Larson
Ask Your Doctor for a Free Sample

Website of the Day
Will Old Faithful Be Sucked Dry?

November 10, 2008

David Roediger
Obama's Victory and the Future of Race in the United States

Paul Craig Roberts
Conned Again?

Peter Lee
Obama's Man in Afghanistan

Corey D. B. Walker
And We Are Not Saved

Jeff Halper
A Bone in America's Throat

Bill Hatch
Look on the Bright Side, Dammit!

Andy Worthington
Guilty By Torture

Bill Quigley
Anger and Hope: Haitian Families Furious Over School Collapse

Peter Morici
Paulson's Folly

Anthony Olszewski
The Advent of a New Black Politician

Kim Nicolini
Exile and Displacement on Bunker Hill

Cpt. Paul Watson
Farley Mowat's Last Book? Maybe Not

Website of the Day
Boondocks, Another Banned Episode

November 7 / 9, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Hail to the Chief of Staff

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Fire

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Indian: the Many Faces of Sonal Shah

Tariq Ali
Great Expectations

Jean Bricmont
Our Obama Problem

John V. Whitbeck
Obama, Emanuel and Israel

Saul Landau
Politics Among the Ruins: Obama Faces an Economic Disaster

Peter Morici
Gone, Baby, Gone: Another 240,000 Jobs Lost

Lawrence Velvel
Obama and Afghanistan: the Return of Clintonia?

Karyn Strickler
Don't Govern From the Middle

Nativo V. Lopez
Banking on Obama with Open Eyes: Latinos and Obama

Christopher Fons
A Generational Moment: From Jackson to Obama

Alan Farago
Sarah Palin's Limited Engagement

David Yearsley
Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

Christopher Brauchli
Pardoning Industry: Bush's Latest Executive Orders

Samah Sabawi
Gaza's New Cemetery

Dave Lindorff
Getting the Change We've Earned

Deepak Tripathi
A Revolution to Remember

Beth Sherouse
In the Wake of Lost Initiatives: the Gay Glass is Half Empty

Patrick Irelan
La Belle Dame Sans Regrets: Back to Alaska

Stephen Martin
Barack and the Temple

Richard Rhames
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss

J. Murray
White Cherokee Mythology

Lorenzo Wolff
Anthems for the Average Kid

Kim Nicolini
Exile and Displacement on Bunker Hill: Art Meets Realism in "The Exiles"

Poets' Basement
Farrelly, Fleming and Browne

Website of the Day
Take Who Takes You (For the New Big O)

November 6, 2008

Frank J. Menetrez
Now What?

John Chuckman
The Big Leap: From Hope to Change

P. Sainath
A Magic Moment (But Still Behind the Global Curve)

Joshua Frank
A Look Under the Hood of an Obama Administration

Edna Canetti
Come, Obama, Change My Life: a Plea from Israel

John Ross
Brad Will is Still Dead

Norman Solomon
Sorry Joe: a Mandate for Spreading the Wealth

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
The Morning After: Pakistan and Its New Bedfellow

Robert Weissman
Mordor Brightens: Obama's Challenge--and Our Own

Harvey Wasserman
A Blow to Nuclear Power in Chicago

Website of the Day
Pot Wins Big

November 5, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
Why McCain Lost

Chuck Spinney
How Obama Won

Ishmael Reed
Morning in Obamerica: the Promised Land?

Chris Floyd
A Prism for the New Paradigm: "What If Bush Did It?"

Binoy Kampmark
Obama's Victory: a Nation Divided

Michael Donnelly
The Rebooting of America, 2008

David Macaray
Who Should be Secretary of Labor?

Peter Morici
Obama's First Moves on the Economy

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
What Real Change Should Bring

William Willers
Will We be Forced to Sell Off the Public Lands?

Website of the Day
The Killing Fields of South Africa

November 4, 2008

Kathleen Christison
McCain, Obama and Khalidi

James Ridgeway
A New World?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Cleaning Out the Pentagon Pig Sty

Mike Whitney
Obama's Little Red Book

Conn Hallinan
A New Foreign Policy

Holly M. Barker
The Inequities of Climate Change and the Small Island Experience

Ashley Smith
Where is the Occupation of Iraq Heading?

Andy Worthington
Guilty Verdict Fails to Justify Gitmo Trials

Martha Rosenberg
AIG: Too Big to Play Fair

Stephen Martin
Breakdown of the Globalisation Agenda

Doug Lummis
Full Moon Over Okinawa

Carlos Fierro
An Anarchist View of Elections

Website of the Day
La Pequeña as Sarah Palin

November 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
Friends Like These

John Kennedy O'Hara
Voter Lockdown: Prosecuting Voters

Peter Montague
Is Nuclear Power Green?

Steve Conn
Nader and the Youth Vote

Andrew Gebhardt
How Much Do the Differences Between Obama, McCain and Bush Really Matter?

Ron Jacobs
Bombing Syria: Borders are for Sissies

Ralph Nader
Between Hope and Reality: an Open Letter to Senator Obama

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Cleaning Up After Bush

Uri Avnery
Obama and the Order of the Optimists

Dave Lindorff
Studs and Me

Fred Gardner
Adieu, Rimonabant

DC Larson
You Are How You Vote

David Michael Green
McCain Finally Gets Tough

Val Strange
Hopeless Hoi Polloi or Step in the Right Direction?

Tuli Kupferberg /
Jeffrey Lewis
Wailing Wall Street:
Bring Spare Money!

Website of the Day
Pranking Palin (the Uncut Version)

October 31 , 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Change You Can See

Jeffrey St. Clair
Killing Leroy Jackson: the Indian Wars Have Never Ended

Douglas Valentine
Giving Aid and Comfort to the Enemy: McCain's 14th Amendment Problem

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
The Great Bailout Fraud: Misrepresenting the Financial Crisis

Dr. Ignacy Nowopolski
Is the Global Economy a Mistake? an Interview with Paul Craig Roberts

Alan Maass
What's So Funny About Peace, Love and Spreading the Wealth?

William P. O’Connor
Reflections of an Average Joe

Patrick Irelan
Johnny's Tantrums: McCain the "Gook Hater"

Brian Cloughley
Out of Control: Memo From Islamabad

Mats Svensson
The Last Dance in Ramallah

Binoy Kampmark
Into Syria We Went

Steve Conn
The Future of Ted and Sarah

Alan Farago
The Division of Florida: the Politics of Growth

Morton Skorodin
The Bush-Obama-McCain Administration

Robert Bryce
Not McCain

Wajahat Ali
Dear John McCain, Please Stop...

David Yearsley
Palin's Flute, Obama's Voice

Dennis Loo
What to Do with Bush and Cheney?

Pam Martens
Why 2008 Feels Like 1932

Stephen Martin
Defense Strategies in Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Nothing for Something: the Doomed Rustic's Lament

Ramzy Baroud
A Third Palestinian Intifada

Missy Beattie
I'm Sick of Their Voices

Howard Lisnoff
Burning Reason: More From the Religious Right

Richard Neville
Pickled Heads: First the Revelation, Then the Revolution

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassan
Bush Ultra Lite: Oliver Stone's Oedipal Problem

Kim Nicolini
Max Payne: Vigilante Violence as Sex Story

Lorenzo Wolff
Dance to the Music--or Else!

Poets' Basement
Four Poems from the Japanese Trans. by Rexroth

Website of the Weekend
Art Against Empire

October 30, 2008

Cockburn / St. Clair
McCain's Women Problems

Vijay Prashad
Smearing Rashid Khalidi

Paul Craig Roberts
World Tires of Rule by Dollar

Glen Ford
Turning the Tide of Ethnic Cleansing in America's Cities

Stanley Heller
Wall Street Bonus Madness

William Loren Katz
"Kill Him!:" a Political Chronicle

Joshua Frank
Memo to Progressives for Obama: What Happens After the Election?

James McEnteer
The Year of Unreliable Witnesses

Felice Pace
The Big Change: Can "Civic Unreasonableness" Save the Earth?

Jonathan Cook
The Executions at Kafr Qassem

Reza Fiyouzat
Boycott the Elections!

Website of the Day
An Open Letter to Whole Foods

October 29, 2008

Arno J. Mayer
The US Empire will Survive Bush

Eric Toussaint
How the Food and Financial Crises are Interconnected

Matt Gonzalez
What Do They Have to Do to Lose Your Vote?

Steven Conn
Obama and the Camp Followers

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Visit to a Father's Grave

Patrick Bond
Strauss-Kahn Strikes Again!

Ramzi Kysia
A Freedom Rider in Gaza City

Douglas Valentine
A Glimpse Inside the Head of Joe the Plumber

Stephen Martin
What America is Owed

Margaret Dooley-Sammuli
Alternatives to Incarceration

Amee Chew
Support Obama, Vote McKinney?

Website of the Day
N-Word Chant Doesn't Phase Palin

October 28, 2008

James G. Abourezk
How to Bail Out the Taxpayers

Andy Worthington
The Empty Chair at Guantánamo

Gary Leupp
The Specter of the Sixties: Palin v. Ayers

Paul Craig Roberts
The End of the American Road

Mike Whitney
Meet the World's New Currency

Gregory V. Button
What the Next President Must Do to Save FEMA

Ralph Nader
Share the Sacrifices, Share the Benefits

P. Sainath
Haunted by Socialism

Martha Rosenberg
Melting Pot in Hell

Charles R. Larson
Palin/Wurzelbacher 2012!

Website of the Day
Why You Can't See Across the Grand Canyon

October 27, 2008

Michael Hudson
Scenes From the Global Class War

Barbara Rose Johnston
The Clean, Green Nuclear Machine?

John Dinges
Palling Around with Dictators: McCain and Pinochet

Mike Whitney
Chickenhawks and the Horrors of War

Mary Lynn Cramer Greenspan's Higher Power

Alan Farago
Origins of the Fall

David Michael Green
Remind Me Again: Who Won the Cold War?

Andy Worthington
The Collapse of Omar Khadr's Guantánamo Trial

George Wuerthner
Is Ranching Sustainable? The Story of Bob the Rancher

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Obamanations of Barack

Website of the Day
Heartland of Darkness

October 24 / 26, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Waiting for the Curtain to Rise

Ishmael Reed
Boogiemen: How Lee Atwater Perfected the G.O.P.'s Appeal to Racism

Mike Whitney
Down for the Count

Don Santina
How Maria Fell: Death in the Central Valley

Scott Boehm
Manufacturing Sympathy: Palin, Special Needs and Identity Politics

Saul Landau
Faith-Based Surge: Whining About Winning in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
Iraq and the Arrogance of Washington

Binoy Kampmark
Afghanistan the Un-Winnable

Linn Washington Jr.
The Great Vote Fraud Hoax

Nicole Colson
Mocking Our Rights: McCain's Disdain for Women's Health

Bernard Chazelle
The Humorology of Power

Brian Jones
Campaign by Codeword

Christopher Brauchli
Down the Drain with McCain's Vetters

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia Rejects Neoliberalism

Val Strange
The Fraternity of John McCain: Scenes from North Carolina

Joe Mowrey
Name That Candidate: He Supports Petraeus, the Death Penalty, the Bailout, Nuclear Power, the Occupation...

Steve Early
SEIU Learns the Meaning of "No"

David Macaray
Patriotism and the Labor Movement

Allison Kilkenny
You Have the Right to Airport Harassment

Richard Rhames
Open Season

Jim Bell
Nuclear Power's Big Con

Kris De Welde
Domestic Violence and Financial Stress

Barry Clemson
John Wayne Syndrome

Adam Engel
Last Exit to Disneyland

Mark Scaramella
The World's Weirdest Pipe Organ?

Tuli Kupferberg
Nobody for President: the Original Version (Annotated)

Lorenzo Wolff
A Frustrated, Broken-Hearted Joy from Kidnapkin

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Swartzfager and Payne

Website of the Weekend
Patrick Cockburn Dismantles the Surge

October 23, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
What Voter Fraud?

Todd Chretien
Why I'm Not Voting for Obama

John Ross
No Child Left Behind, Mexican-Style

Peter Morici
Strategies to End the Crisis

Mats Svensson
Short Film Clips at a Checkpoint

Marlene Martin
Don't Let Them Execute an Innocent Man

Robert Jensen /
Pat Youngblood
Looking Beyond the Election and Beyond Elections

Margaret Kimberley
Rightwing Obama Love

Deepak Tripathi
Post-Bush Scenarios

David Morris
Why Joe the Plumber is a Socialist (And You Are, Too)

Website of the Day
Voting While Black in North Carolina

October 22, 2008

Brian Cloughley
Kid Killers are Barbarians

Heather Gray
Raising Hell in the South: the Legacy of J. L. Chestnut, Jr.

Jeff Birkenstein
McCain's Disdain for Spain

Ralph Nader
The Song Remains the Same: Convergence and Avoidance in the Presidential Election

DC Larson
The Growing of a Heartland Nader Raider

David Swanson
Colin Powell, Not Qualified for Government Service

Keeanga-Yamatta Taylor Race and the Election: When the "Real" America Enters the Voting Booth

Larry Everest
9/11 and the Imperial Adventure in Afghanistan

Robert Fantina
Anything to Win

Martha Rosenberg
The Financier's Playbook

Stephen Martin
Giving It Up to the Combine

Website of the Day
Brokers with Hands on Their Faces

October 21, 2008

Vijay Prashad
Wealth's Apostles

Paul Craig Roberts
How Inflation Works: Why I Can't Buy an Old Ferrari

Corey D. B. Walker
Empire and White Supremacy

Steve Breyman
How to "Win" in Afghanistan

Eric Toussaint
The Economic Crisis and Latin America: Time to Delink

Wajahat Ali
Boo Radley Comes Out to Play: the Emerging Muslim-American Electorate

Robert Weitzel
Wasting a Vote for Lincoln's Radical Ideal (Or Why I'm Voting for Nader)

Brendan Cooney
Palinoscopy: an Exploration of Why Liberals are So Obsessed with Sarah Palin

Dave Lindorff
Cuba's Oil Reserves: a Game-Changer?

Marqueece Harris-Dawson / Bob Wing
When You're a Black Candidate There's No Such Thing as a Safe Lead

Patrick B. Barr
Socialist, Socialist, SOCIALIST!

Omar Barghouti
The Boycott and Palestinian Groups: Countering the Critics

Website of the Day
How to Dismantle a US War Plane (and Get Away With It)

October 20, 2008

Michael Hudson
The ABCs of Paulson's Bailout

Anthony DiMaggio
The Scandal That Never Was: ACORN, Rightwing Media and Election "Fraud"

Tariq Ali
Zardari Bans My Books

Uri Avnery
Is Akko Burning?

Bill Quigley
Hammered by the Swedes

Ben Rosenfeld
The Politics of St. Joe, Martyr to a Lie

David Michael Green
Payback's a Bitch: McCain on the Ash Heap

William S. Lind
The Afghanistan Advantage

Chris Genovali
Drill, Baby, Drill (Wink, Wink)

Stephen Martin
The Last Man in America

Howard Lisnoff
Bad News for War Resisters

David Yearsley
Organ Meat

Website of the Day
Our Brother is Sick: the Steve Ferguson Cancer Fund

October 17 / 19, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Blow Ups and Bombers

Jeffrey St. Clair
Inside Hanford: a Trip to America's Most Toxic Place

Pam Martens
How the Banksters are Making a Killing Off the Bailout

Paul Craig Roberts
Government of Thieves

Mike Whtney
No More Investment Banks

Michael D. Yates
Bowling Alley Blues: Racism Dies Hard in Johnstown, PA

Suzanne Smith
The Energy-War Connection: McCain Said It, Why Don't We?

Carl Boggs
Prosecuting Bush

Ralph Nader
Closing the Courthouse Doors

Fidel Castro
The Global Crash

Dave Marsh
The Great Levi Stubbs

Saul Landau
Denial, the Election Musical Comedy

Jo Guldi
The Floods of Heaven

Kevin Zeese
Now the Cost of War Really Matters

Larry Everest
Afghanistan, Not a Good War Gone Bad

Steve Early
Stop, in the Name of Joe!

David Macaray
Hey, Joe

Ben Terrall
When Ike Hit Haiti

Missy Beattie
Palin and God's Children

Don Monkerud
American Exceptionalism

Helen Redmond
Health Care Now's Big Con

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Delta Vision: Canals and Dams to Bail Out Big Ag

Wajahat Ali
Bush Gets Stoned

Farzana Versey
The White Tiger's Stripes and Gripes

Vladimir Frolov
Medvedev to Obama: We Come Not to Bury America, But to Buy It

Kim Nicolini
Frozen River: At Last, a Great Movie That's Neither Hip Nor Cool

Poets Basement
Gibbons, Corsale, Davis and Fleming

Website of the Day
The Real Sarah Palin?

November 20, 2008

More Advice for Obama

How Guanántamo Can be Closed

By ANDY WORTHINGTON

Of the 255 prisoners currently held at Guantánamo, around 50 have been “approved for transfer” -- many for at least three years -- but they remain in Guantánamo, mostly imprisoned in conditions that would task the resilience of the most hardened convicted criminals on the US mainland, for two particular reasons. The first is because they are from countries with notoriously poor human rights records (including China, Libya, Syria, Tunisia and Uzbekistan) or unstable regimes like Iraq, and cannot be returned because of international treaties preventing the return of foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture. The second reason is that the administration’s insistence that they are still “enemy combatants” (or are “no longer enemy combatants”) has deterred other countries from accepting them. Even though State Department representatives have been touring the world for the last three years in an attempt to relocate some of these men, the only third country that has been prevailed upon to accept any of them is Albania, which took eight former prisoners in 2006.

I am reliably informed that there are certain career officials in the State Department who have been anxiously awaiting a new administration, in the expectation that it will facilitate greater cooperation between the United States and its allies in Europe, and that some of these countries might now agree to help the United States out of the hole dug by the Bush administration, which regularly made matters worse by criticizing other countries for not helping out. In August 2007, for example, President Bush stated, “I did say it should be a goal of the nation to shut down Guantánamo,” but added, “I also made it clear that part of the delay was the reluctance of some nations to take back some of the people being held there.”

To this end, several prominent human rights and legal organizations -- including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the Center for Constitutional Rights -- launched a campaign in Berlin on November 10 aimed at persuading European countries to accept cleared prisoners from Guantánamo. This is laudable, as it is clearly intolerable that these men remain imprisoned at Guantánamo (and, as it stands, makes Barack Obama’s pledge to close the prison impossible), but if the President-Elect really wants to do the right thing, then he should make the first move by allowing the 17 remaining Uighurs at Guantánamo (Muslims from China’s Xinjiang province, who had fled to Afghanistan to escape Chinese persecution) to settle in the United States.

The Uighurs scored a major victory this summer, after the Supreme Court ruled that the Guantánamo prisoners had constitutional habeas corpus rights. This ruling unlocked hundreds of habeas cases that had stalled in the lower courts following the passage of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which purported to strip the prisoners of the habeas rights granted by the Supreme Court in 2004. When the first of these cases, that of a Uighur prisoner called Huzaifa Parhat, was finally reviewed by the Court of Appeals in Washington D.C., the judges ruled that Parhat’s designation as an “enemy combatant” was invalid, and derided the government’s “evidence” as being akin to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

In the months that followed, the cases against all 17 Uighurs crumbled, as the government admitted that it would “serve no purpose” to continue trying to prove that Parhat was an “enemy combatant,” and then did the same for his 16 compatriots. In October, when Judge Ricardo Urbina of the US District Court in Washington D.C. held a hearing to determine what should happen to the Uighurs, he declared, “Because the Constitution prohibits indefinite detentions without cause, the continued detention is unlawful.” Furthermore, because no third country had been found that would accept the men, he ordered their release to the care of communities in the Washington D.C. area, and Tallahassee, Florida, who had put together detailed plans for their resettlement in the United States.

This was a proud moment for American justice, but the Uighurs never made it to Washington D.C. or Tallahassee. Instead, the government appealed, the Justice Department wheeled out its old and discredited allegations about the men being connected to terrorism (thereby stymieing attempts to find a third country to take them), and, in a brief filed for hearings next week, asserted that the executive branch “has authority to hold aliens in detention even if they are not considered enemies of the US,” adding, for good measure, “even if the detention is indefinite, it is still lawful.”

This is clearly an intolerable situation. As the only prisoners at Guantánamo who have ever persuaded the Bush administration to drop its claims that they are “enemy combatants,” the Uighurs deserve the lifeline extended to them by Judge Urbina. If the appeal goes against them, the new administration should make their release into the United States a priority.

The 80 prisoners scheduled to face trial by Military Commission

President-Elect Obama has already pledged to repeal the Military Commissions Act, which revived the Bush administration’s deeply flawed “terror trials” after the Supreme Court ruled them illegal in June 2006. This should be a priority after January 20, 2009, and should be accompanied by a thorough and independent review of the cases against the 80 or so prisoners facing (or scheduled to face) a trial by Military Commission.

What’s important to note is that the administration’s figure can be whittled down without any difficulty. Of the 17 prisoners currently facing trial by Military Commission, for example, two -- Omar Khadr and Mohamed Jawad -- were juveniles when they were seized, and should have been rehabilitated rather then punished under the terms of the Optional Protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (on the involvement of children in armed conflict). Moreover, significant doubts have been expressed about the quality of the evidence against them, with legitimate claims made by their military defense attorneys (and, in Jawad’s case, by his former prosecutor, who resigned in September) that evidence vital to the defense was deliberately suppressed. In addition, another three of the 17 are minor Afghan insurgents, at best, who are not accused of killing US forces, and have no connection with al-Qaeda. All these prisoners should be released.

Others who have expressed doubts about the Pentagon’s figures are senior officials who spoke to the New York Times in 2004, when a total of 749 prisoners had been held at Guantánamo. In interviews, the Times explained, “dozens of high-level military, intelligence and law-enforcement officials in the United States, Europe and the Middle East said that contrary to the repeated assertions of senior administration officials, none of the detainees at the United States Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay ranked as leaders or senior operatives of al-Qaeda. They said only a relative handful -- some put the number at about a dozen, others more than two dozen -- were sworn Qaeda members or other militants able to elucidate the organization's inner workings.”

To these can be added some, or perhaps the majority of the ten prisoners transferred to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2004, the 14 “high-value detainees” -- including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the other alleged 9/11 conspirators -- who were transferred in September 2006, and two of the six prisoners who arrived at Guantánamo between March 2007 and March 2008. These prisoners -- somewhere between 35 and 50 in total -- are the only ones who should be moved to the US mainland to face trials in federal courtrooms.

There will inevitably be problems -- protecting confidential intelligence sources, for example, and, in particular, dealing with evidence obtained through torture -- but I can see no other alternative. The trials as they stand are an abomination, permeated with systemic pro-prosecution bias, and capable of handing down a life sentence only in a one-sided show trial (that of Ali Hamza al-Bahlul), which passed largely unnoticed in the week before the Presidential election.

Holding prisoners forever without charge or trial is clearly an untenable solution, as it simply perpetuates the Bush administration’s crimes, and recent suggestions -- by both Democrats and Republicans -- that another new trial system should be instigated, or that a form of “preventive detention” should be introduced, are just as redolent of the arrogance of the Bush years, and indicate that those proposing them have learned nothing from the abuse of the Constitution over the last seven years.

In addition, one extra problem that President Obama may have to deal with as soon as he takes office concerns Salim Hamdan, the driver for Osama bin Laden who was convicted of material support for terrorism (but cleared of conspiracy) in a trial that took place over the summer. Hamdan was sentenced to five-and-a-half years’ imprisonment, but his judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, allowed for time served since he was first charged, which means that he will have finished serving his sentence by the end of the year. Allred has refused to bow to pressure from the Defense Department, which attempted to claim that he had no right to allow time served to be taken into account, but the Pentagon may yet assert that it has the right to continue holding Hamdan as an “enemy combatant,” even after his sentence is over.

Like the plight of the Uighurs, this is completely unjustifiable, as Hamdan was convicted by a military jury in a trial of the administration’s own devising, but if the outgoing President insists on holding Hamdan after his sentence is served, President Obama will have to ensure that he is allowed to return to his family in Yemen.

The 125 prisoners who are “too dangerous” to be released

The notion that prisoners can be “too dangerous to release but not guilty enough to prosecute” is another hallmark of the Bush administration’s disdain for the law, but this, too, has been embraced by enthusiasts for a new policy of “preventive detention.” The rationale is, however, also unjustifiable. As I hope to have demonstrated in my previous article, in which I dissected the failures of the interrogators at Guantánamo to distinguish between genuine intelligence and false confessions produced through the use of torture, coercion or bribery, there is no reason to elevate these prisoners to even the lowest rungs of a terrorist hierarchy, and every reason to follow the conclusions reached by senior military and intelligence officials: that no more than 35 to 50 of the prisoners had any meaningful connection with al-Qaeda.

There is, at present, some hope that these prisoners’ habeas reviews will demonstrate the weakness of the government’s evidence against these 125 prisoners. In the case of six Bosnians accused of plotting to blow up the US embassy in Sarajevo, for example, their habeas review began with the government dropping the claim (which, it should be noted, was dismissed by the Bosnian government in January 2002, before the men were kidnapped and sent to Guantánamo), and it seems probable that other cases will also see the government dropping its “evidence,” before the judges can conclude, as the appeal court judges did in the case of Huzaifa Parhat, that it is no more reliable than the nonsense poetry of Lewis Carroll.

I can only hope that the habeas reviews continue to force the government to drop more of its redundant claims against the prisoners, as my research has illuminated, above all, how the protestations of innocent men -- and of Taliban foot soldiers recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before 9/11 and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda -- have been overshadowed with disturbing regularity by allegations made by unnamed “senior figures in al-Qaeda,” interrogated in unknown circumstances, or by other prisoners who have made false confessions, often on a colossal scale, in the hope of securing more favorable treatment. Stark examples of both of these practices are available, but many more are reported in The Guantánamo Files, and what they demonstrate, above all, is how the entire “War on Terror” detention program, as executed at Guantánamo, was designed to do away with the presumption of innocence, and was, instead, focused solely on confirming preordained guilt.

The 125 prisoners in question are from a variety of nations -- a few dozen of the remaining Afghans, several dozen more from the countries of North Africa and the Gulf -- but up to half are from the largest remaining group at Guantánamo: the Yemenis. Unlike the 130 Saudis, who were mostly released from Guantánamo in 2006 and 2007, after the Saudi government instigated a rehabilitation program (involving religious retraining and support in finding wives and employment), which met with the approval of the US authorities, only 13 of the 108 Yemenis in Guantánamo have been released, even though they, like the Saudis, were, for the most part, a mixture of Taliban foot soldiers and humanitarian aid workers and missionaries, caught up in an undiscriminating dragnet.

The problem, as has been repeatedly stated, is that the US authorities claim that they are not convinced that the Yemeni government will be able to guarantee that the men will not continue to pose a threat to the United States. For their part, as the Houston Chronicle reported on Saturday, “Yemeni officials say they're ready to try many of the men and imprison those who are convicted, but they complain that US officials refuse to share evidence with them.” The Yemeni foreign minister, Abu Bakr al-Kirbi, explained, “Based on the information we have, some of the Guantánamo prisoners have nothing to do with terrorism. We cannot imprison them without a court sentence. We cannot do something that is against our laws. We are accountable to our own public.”

Al-Kirbi is undoubtedly right that some of the men pose no threat to anybody, and cannot be detained without reason, but to break the deadlock both sides need to sit down and hammer out a deal -- perhaps one that involves judge Hamoud Al-Hitar, the head of Yemen’s Dialogue Committee, which, as the Yemen Times reported last December, “aims at steering extremists away from violence through a number of dialogue sessions.” Al-Hitar’s program is widely credited as the inspiration for the Saudis’ successful rehabilitation program, and it would surely, therefore, make sense for the US and Yemeni governments to work out how to come up with a suitable program for Yemen that will enable Barack Obama to close Guantánamo.

Then we can move on to what lies behind Guantánamo: the unaccountable prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq, which hold an estimated 39,000 prisoners, and the unknown number of prisoners still held in secret CIA custody, or rendered to torture in third countries, who constitute “America’s Disappeared.”

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

He can be reached at: andy@andyworthington.co.uk

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