Today's Stories

August 7 - 9, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
It Pays to Have a Nuke

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 3, 2009

Pam Martens
Millions of Americans Pushed Into No-Law System by Colluding Banks

Anthony DiMaggio
Media Backlash: Obama and the Settlements

Udi Aloni
And Who Shall I Say is Calling? A Plea to Leonard Cohen

Mike Roselle
See the Mountains of WestVirginia ... Before They're Blown Up!

Dr. Susan Block
Beat It! Sex, Death and Michael Jackson

Roy Bourgeois / Margaret Knapke
School of Coups

Joe Bageant
A Yard Sale in Chernobyl

Dina Jadallah
Hiding the State

Dave Lindorff
Of Blue Dogs and Jellyfish

Martha Rosenberg
Grand Closings in Evanston: How the Recession is Hitting Illinois

Website of the Day
Why We Can't "Afford" Health Care

July 31 - August 2, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
The Biden and Clinton Mutinies

Gabriel Kolko
Searching For Enemies

John Prados
The Intelligence Oversight Mess

Joe Bageant
The Bastards Never Die

Tim Wise
Rationalizing Racial Oppression

Carl Ginsburg
Frist First: Follow the Money (and Find the Plump Heart of "Health Care")

Michael Fox
The Honduran Coup as Overture

John Lindsay-Poland
Revamping Plan Colombia

Michael Winship
Pay-to-Play: Washington's Sport of Kings

Rev. William Alberts
White Men Can Jump ... to Conclusions

Andy Worthington
Judge Orders Release of Tortured Gitmo Prisoner

Steve Breyman
Counting the Unemployed

Cyrus Bina
Racism, Class and Profiling

Missy Beattie
Promises Ignored

Ron Jacobs
Into the Vapid: Consuming the Cultural Product

Willie L. Pelote, Sr.
Party of Concessions: Democrats Never Learn

Lucia Alvarez
Fall of the House of Kirchner? Return of the Right in Argentina

Dave Lindorff
David Brooks' White Guy Nightmare

Lawrence R. Velvel
Madoff: What Should be Done Now?

Omar Barghouti /
Sid Shniad
United for Freedom and Universal Justice

James L. Secor
The Name of the Game is Wipe-Out

Belén Fernández
Zelaya in Nicaragua: Has Another Constitution Been Violated?

Jeffrey St. Clair
Frank Lloyd Wright in Hollywood: the Ennis House as Imperial Ruin

David Yearsley
Beauty in Dark Places: Berlin's Olympic Stadium

Brian J. Foley
Pre-Eating: a Threat to Restaurants Everywhere

Alan Cabal
Onward, Into the Fog: Thomas Pynchon's
"Inherent Vice"

Kim Nicolini
The Way War Feels

Lorenzo Wolff
The Way It Felt the First Time: the Jump Rope Magic of the Shangri-Las

Poets' Basement
Four Poems From the Chinese

Website of the Weekend
Obama's Ex-Doc Knocks ObamaCare

July 30, 2009

Patrick Cockburn
Victims of a Covert Tit-for-Tat War

Gareth Porter
Afghanistan's US-Backed Child-Raping Police

Saul Landau
Summer of Denial

Greg Grandin
Honduran Coup Over?

Diane Farsetta
Pentagon Pundits Get a Pass

Stephen Soldz
The King Case, the APA and the Missing Ethics Investigation

Alan Farago
Learning How to Survive in a Depression From "Weeds"

David Macaray
Cops and Labor Unions

Mike Howells /
Jay Arena
Volunteerism Will Not Rebuild the Gulf Coast

Christopher Brauchli
Oatmeal Envy

Website of the Day
Changing the SOFA

July 29, 2009

Carl Ginsburg
Our Crisis, Their Gain

Clifton Ross
From Tegucigalpa to El Paraiso: a Voyage From Curfew to State of Siege

Paul Craig Roberts
How Fake is the "Recovery"?

Franklin C. Spinney
Winning Hearts and Minds, Pentagon Style

James Bovard Lackawanna Six: Bogus Charges and Martial Law

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, the Media and Public Opinion

Bouthaina Shaaban
How Will Arabs Wake Up?

Greg Moses
A Catch and Trade Policy for Labor Costs

Wajahat Ali
No Racism in Obama's Post-Race America?

Gary Leupp
Beer Will Not Solve This

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
Musharraf, Imran Khan and Overseas Pakistanis

Website of the Day
Why Single-Payer Gets No Respect

July 28, 2009

Jean Bricmont
Bombing for a Juster World?

Uri Avnery
Obama, Netanyahu and the Settlements

Dean Baker
Right to Rent: a Remedy for the Foreclosure Crisis

Heather Gray
Stupid Cop Tricks: Driving Too Close to a White Female and Other Episodes in Racist Policing

Jonathan Cook
Can an "Arab Soul" Yearn for Israel's Anthem?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Beyond the F-22: the Future of Pentagon Reform

Belén Fernández
Thomas Friedman Does Afghanistan

Carl Finamore
The Hotel Workers' Kickass Local 2

Eli Jelly-Schapiro
Striking the World Cup

Harvey Wasserman
We All Stand Before Peltier's Parole Board

Website of the Day
Behind the Wheel

July 27, 2009

Ishmael Reed
Gates: Post-Race Scholar Yells Racism

Patrick Cockburn
Elections Shake Kurdistan

Roger Burbach
Hillary and Obama Nix Change in Honduras

Steve Breyman
Bomber Joe and Russia: Why is Biden Channeling Cheney?

Ramzy Kysia
Gaza: On the Right of Resistance

Stephen Soldz
Will the American Psychological Association Renounce the Nuremberg Defense?

Raymond J. Lawrence
Sexual Hocus Pocus in the Episcopal Church

Greg Moses
The Color Line is Black

Binoy Kampmark
Swine Flu Panic

Kim Ives
Lavalas and Haiti's Student Union Unite

Website of the Day
Meet the Paid Assassins of Health Care

July 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
"A Damned Murder, Inc."

Clifton Ross
Surreal Honduras

Patrick Cockburn
Party of "Change" Challenges Old Guard in Kurdistan

William Polk
Report Card on Obama From a New Frontiersman

David Sterritt
Screening the Politics Out of the Iraq War

Ray McGovern
Hooded in Bush's Hood

David Lindorff
Cops Gone Wild

Hannah Mermelstein
"The War is With the Arabs"

Carl Ginsburg
The Actually Existing Health Care System

Helen Redmond
The Selling of Single-Payer Features

John Ross
The Song of the Guerrilla

Bill Simpich
Fair Play for Cuba and the Cuban Revolution

Mark Weisbrot
Learning From China on How to Beat the Recession

Lee Sustar
U.S. Labor in Crisis

David Macaray
Union Workers Forced to Accept Massive Cuts

Felipe Matsunaga
Obama's Slow (and Familiar) Dance With Cuba

Sara Mann
Why Health Care Will Kill My TV

Martha Rosenberg
Which is Worse? Germs in Our Food or the Antibiotics That Kill Them?

Missy Beattie
Cha-ching Culture

David Ker Thomson
Empty Nest: a Natural History of Now

Ron Jacobs
United4Iran, a Footnote

Stephen Martin
The Crying of Lots 1 Thru 50

David Yearsley
Psst, I Show You a Feelthy Gluck

Gilad Atzmon
Bruno: a Glimpse Into Zionism?

Kim Nicolini
Guilty Laughter in the Dark: Seeing Brüno Twice

Poets' Basement
Kakak and McLellan

Website of the Weekend
Dead Prez: Summertime

July 23, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Masters of Perfidy: AIG and the System

Saul Landau /
Nelson Valdés
Hypocrisy and the Honduran Coup: Term Limits Only Apply When Governments Help People

Jonathan Cook
The Reality of Israel's "Open" Jerusalem

Nadia Hijab
Israeli Warships in the Red Sea

Dave Lindorff
Living in a Police State: the Gates Incident

Laura Carlsen
21st Century Coups d'Etat

Steve Breyman
Bankers Beware?

Ellen Brown
How California Could Turn Its IOUs Into Dollars

Norman Solomon
Spinning Health Care

Jorge Mariscal
Youth Activists Demand Military-Free Schools

Website of the Day
Copy-Editing Sarah Palin

July 22, 2009

Bernard Chazelle
How to Argue Against Torture

Nikolas Kozloff
The Coup and the U.S. Airbase in Honduras

Carl Ginsburg
The Recovery, Phase Two

Clifton Ross
Back to the Future? Return to El Salvador

Anthony DiMaggio
Health Care, Media and the Case for Socialized Medicine

Michael Donnelly
The Whoppers Behind WOPR

Nadia Hijab
Memoirs of a Lost Arab World

Dedrick Muhammad
Structural Inequality: News Not Fit to Print?

Charles Thomson
Cronyism at the Tate

Alan Farago
Ted Williams and the Florida Keys

Website of the Day
Himmelstein: Howard Dean is a Liar

July 21, 2009

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Iranian Election and Its Aftermath

Uri Avnery
Breaking the Silence on Israeli War Crimes

Dean Baker
Séance on Wall Street

Jonathan Cook
Team Twitter: Israel's Internet War

Dave Lindorff
Saving Private Bergdahl

Andy Worthington
Interrogating the Uighurs

David Macaray
Heat, Dust and OSHA

Carl Finamore
The Deferential Party

Harvey Wasserman
Cronkite and Three Mile Island

Walter Brasch
The Marie Antoinettes of Health Care

Website of the Day
Linebaugh: Magna Carta and the Commons

July 20, 2009

Pam Martens
Judicial Apartheid

Nikolas Kozloff
Honduras and the Big Stick: Obama's Bullish Behavoir in Latin America

Paul Craig Roberts
Threatening Iran

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Policy on China and Iran

Ira Glunts
Netanyahu's Time Bomb: Building in the Vineyard of the Mufti

P. Sainath
Put Your Money Down, Boys

Binoy Kampmark
The Moon Landing and the Cold War

Stephen Fleischman
The First Anchorman

Norman Solomon
Cronkite and Vietnam: Beyond the Hype

Andy Worthington
Predictable Chaos as Gitmo Trials Resume

Ron Jacobs
Out of the Haze, Into the Darkness: Recalling 1979

Website of the Day
Why Publishing Can't be Saved (as it is)

July 17-19, 2009

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

Nikolas Kozloff
Chiquita in Latin America: From Arbenz to Zelaya

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

Joe Bageant
America's White Underclass

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

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

John Ross
Jurassic Fallout in Mexico

Sue Sturgis
Senator Sessions, Race and Impartiality

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

Peter Morici
Obama's Donut Economics

Pervez Hoodbhoy
Whither Pakistan? A Five-Year Forecast

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the Language of Power

Greg Moses
The Real Demand Crisis

Kia Mistilis
The Niger Delta Crisis

Missy Beattie
The Placebo President

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

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

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

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

Marc Levy
Just Like Hanoi Jane

Matt Siegfried
The Good War Goes Hot

Stephen Martin
Panopticon Blues

Ben Sonnenberg
Sembène's Faat Kiné

David Macaray
Casablanca: When Melodrama Trumped History

Charles R. Larson
A Pakistani, Victorian Novel Celebrating Women

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

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

Poets' Basement
Payne, Anderson and Williams

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

July 16, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
What Economy?

Afshin Rattansi Iranian Planes and the Hidden Toll of Economic Sanctions

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

Evan Knappenberger
Profile of a Deserter

Michelle Bollinger
Why is Leonard Peltier Still in Prison?

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

Belén Fernández
Iranian Penetration, Oh My!

Alice Walker
What is Torture Like? A Letter to Obama

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

Albert Osueke
Sotomayor and the Identity Mountain

Website of the Day
Sotomayor for the Prosecution

July 15, 2009

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Assassination Bureau

Vijay Prashad
A Political Recession

Dean Baker
Stimulus Arithmetic

Ray McGovern
Cheney Sweating Bullets

Jonathan Cook
Jenin's Model of "Economic Peace"

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

Eric Walberg
Uighurs vs. Afghans: a Study in Contrast

Greg Moses
Three Dimensions of a Complete Stimulus Plan

Sousan Hammad
Decolonizing Israel

Binoy Kampmark
The Trial of Charles Taylor

Tracy McLellan
The Story of My Arrest

Website of the Day
11 Days in Saudi Gitmo

July 14, 2009

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

Joanne Mariner
Obama's New Euphemism

Franklin Spinney
The Taliban Rope-a-Dope

Steve Heilig
Walking Mount Tam: an Interview with Gary Snyder

Ali Abunimah
Hamas' Choice

Dave Lindorff
The End of "Nice" Health Care Reform

Nikolas Kozloff
The Politics of Destabilization: McCain and Honduras

Ellen Brown
From Golden State to Subprime State

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

Ron Jacobs
Protest U.S. Aggression

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

Website of the Day
Mel Brooks Does the French Revolution

July 13, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Essence of the Regime

Mike Whitney
The Deflating Economy

P. Sainath
How the World Depression Hits Orissa

Gareth Porter
A US / Iraq Conflict on Iran

Paul Moore
Rap in the Streets, Rap in the Suites

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

Andy Worthington Former Insider Shatters Credibility of Military Commissions

David Macaray
Cartoon Voices: Serf's Up in Hollywood

Cal Winslow
The Healthcare Worker War

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Spring in the Time of Obama

Website of the Day
Washington's Deep Game with China

July 10-12, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Biden Problem

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

John Ross
After the Honduran Coup

Conn Hallinan
The Settlements and the Quartet

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

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

Carl Ginsburg
Summers' Clouded Crystal Ball

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

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

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Parable of the Golden Parachute

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

Jim Goodman
Rural America Needs More Than Listening Sessions

Christopher Bickerton
Europe's New Politics of Hard Times

Wendell Potter
Health Care Industry Adopts Tobacco Lobby's Tactics

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

David Ker Thomson
Switchbacking Toward Bastille Day

Anthony DiMaggio
The Michael Jackson Feeding Frenzy

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

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

Stephanie Westbrook
Yes, We Camp

Roger Gaess
The Shades of Highgate Cemetery

David Yearsley
Tara, America's Dream House

Kim Nicolini
Caution: Men at Work, Robbing Banks

Poets' Basement
Five Poems From the Japanese

Website of the Weekend
Free Tiga and Hugh!

Weekend Edition
August 7 - 9, 2009

CounterPunch Diary

It Pays to Have a Nuke

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Remember when the two Chinese American journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee,  were first convicted earlier this year and given 12-year prison terms in one of North Korea’s  labor camps? Working for a tv channel owned by former vice president Al Gore, the two had crossed North Korea’s border with China, intent on investigating the alleged trafficking of North Korean women as sex slaves in the People’s Republic.

There were wall-to-wall headlines, screams on all the talk shows. Was there ever a failed state as barbaric as North Korea? Not only is this rogue nation endangering the security of the planet in its efforts to elbow its way into the exclusive club of nuclear powers, but now it had dispatched two Chinese-American journalists to camps notorious for their brutality and appalling conditions.

It was always obvious that the harsh sentences faced by Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee were tied up in the evolution of relations between North Korea and the new Obama government and this judgement  has been vindicated by the speed with which they were sprung, once Bill Clinton paid a visit.

So now let us let’s try and achieve some sense of balance on the charge of barbarism.

Let’s suppose a country has endured half a century of continuous attack by assailants based in the United States, with nearly 4,000 dead and 2,000 wounded. Let’s further suppose that when this country, trying to expand its tourist industry, listens to widely broadcast plans by these assailants to sabotage these plans by attacking the tourists – which they duly do, killing one. Now let us suppose that this country sends investigators to infiltrate the assailants, and hands the results of their probe to the FBI and…

I’m talking about the Cuban Five – courageous men who went to southern Florida, and penetrated the Cuban gusano gangs, specifically Alpha 66, the F4 Commandos, the Cuban American National Foundation, and Brothers to the Rescue.

In 1998, after Fidel Castro dispatched Gabriel Garcia Marquez as an emissary to the Clinton White House, the United States sent an FBI team to Havana to discuss the attacks. Cuba handed over 64 files on 31 different terrorist acts and plans against the island in the decade of the ’90s.
After this effort to enlist the U.S. government in stopping terrorist acts (abetted and maybe initiated by the U.S. government), Cuba expected the FBI to start arresting the terrorists. Nt for the first time, Fidel Castro gravely underestimated the good faith of the US government. The Cubans  had underestimated President Bill Clinton’s and Al Gore’s over-riding desire to service the Cuban right in Florida. On  September 12, 1998, the Bureau arrested the very investigators who had come to Miami to probe the activities of the Miami terrorists. Gerardo Hernandez received a double life sentence, and Antonio Guerrero and Ramon Labañino received life sentences. The remaining two, Fernando Gonzalez and René Gonzalez, received 19 and 15 years respectively.

It’s true that the Five weren’t sent to a labor camp akin to those in the North Korean gulag. Where they were sent was described in CounterPunch earlier this year by Hernandez who was interviewed by the filmmaker Saul Landau, who is making a documentary about the Cuban 5.

Hernandez: They took us to the prison, the Center of Federal Detention in Miami and put us in “the hole.”

SL: For how long?

GH: 17 months. 

SL: Describe “the hole?”

GH: It’s an area that every prison has, where they put prisoners for disciplinary or for protective purposes, if they can’t be with the rest of the population. In those first 6 months in “solitary confinement,” we had a shower inside the cell so you can bathe whenever you want. But you get everything in the cell wet when you take a shower. You’re in the cell 23 hours a day. And one hour a day of recreation where they take you to another place. In Miami, it was a bit bigger and with this grid through which you could see a little piece of the sky. You could tell if it was day or night, and a bit of fresh air would come through. The regimen was strict. They used to punish prisoners who commit a serious indiscipline. There we were 23, some times 24 hours a day, inside those 4 small walls, with nothing to do. It’s very difficult from a humane point of view.  And many people couldn’t take it. You could see them start to lose their minds, start screaming.

SL: Did you do something bad?

GH: No, we were sent there from the beginning. They told us it was to protect us from the general population. But, in my opinion, it had more to do with their attempt to get us to turn. After fear and intimidation didn’t work, they thought: ‘Well, let’s put them in solitary for a few months and see if they change their minds.’

Then, after the sentencing, the Cubans were sent to different penitentiaries. Hernandez was sent to Lompoc in 2003, and into “the box.” That happened to the Five in all 5 prisons on the same day. It still isn’t clear why, or who gave the order. Lompoc is a very old prison, apart from “the hole,” which is where they send people who attack guards or set fire to mattresses; for the incorrigible, “the box,” a basement below “the hole” -- 10 double-doored cells.

They put me down there, in my underwear, barefoot for a month. I didn’t know if it was day or night, because you’re inside for 24 hours. There’s no hour of recreation or anything. A leak dripped from the cell above. Whenever that person flushed the toilet, dirty water would run down my cell’s walls.

I complained about health dangers. But they had planned to keep us there for one year for “special administrative measures.” They had warned me I wouldn’t have any contacts, no visits, no nothing. To communicate with my lawyer, I had to submit a letter. I had to make an envelope out of a piece of paper, and seal it with toothpaste. Nothing to read, nothing to write with, nothing! That was quite a difficult month. They [prison authorities] told us we’d be there for a year, and at the end of that year they’d review our cases; we could be there indefinitely. When the guards planned to take me for a bath 3 or 4 guards would handcuff me. The other cells had their exterior doors open. The interior door was like a closed fence, but the iron exterior door that isolated you completely, was left open, so people wouldn’t go crazy. But mine was always closed. When they’d take me to shower, they’d close the other doors so no one would even see me -- because one of the rules was that I could have contact with no one. I was there for a month, not knowing if it was day or night, dirty water running down my walls, barefoot, with the light on 24 hours a day; hearing screams of people around me, some of whom gone crazy. One day, a Thursday, they brought me papers to sign, saying I would be there for one year. The following Tuesday, without explanation, just as they’d brought me there without knowing anything, they took me out. We found out that lots of people had protested outside the prison. Members of Congress had inquired about us.

Having set North Korea barbarity in a larger perspective, let us turn to the dangers its testing program and intermittent detonations pose to world security. On May 25, North Korea conducted its second underground nuclear test, two and a half  years after its first. Obama promptly denounced it as "a grave threat to the peace and stability of the world." He added that North Korea's actions had "flown in the face of United Nations resolutions" and were inviting deeper international isolation.

Almost four months earlier, Obama had nothing to say when, on February 3 or 4, two nuclear-powered submarines, one British, one French, each carrying at nuclear missiles, collided in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Unlike the North Koreans, who immediately reported their test to the world, Britain and France said nothing. Neither did the United States. All three clearly hoped that this indubitable threat to world safety would remain a secret.

On February 16, the British, Murdoch-owned Sun was the first to disclose the crash. Then, and only then an anonymous British official said the Vanguard's "deterrent capability remained unaffected and there was no compromise to nuclear safety." No members of the crew were injured.
France's Defense Ministry said in a brief statement Feb. 6 that the Le Triomphant had struck "a submerged object (probably a container)" during a return from a patrol, damaging the sonar dome on the front of the submarine.” The French ministry did not confirm the date of the collision, and didn’t mention the British sub. The Vanguard limped back to homeport, seen by observers to be considerably dented. The French sub, Le Triomphant, blind because of the damage to its sonar dome, was escorted by a frigate back to its base on France’s west coast. There is no reason to believe a single word of either the British or French governments on the incident.

Given Obama’s silence on this manifest threat to world security, I invite CounterPunchers to prepare appropriately sarcastic statement to be read out by North Korea’s president or his latest designated successor, perhaps beginning with the statement by one British navy man that  “it was a millions-to-one unlucky chance” both subs were in the same patch of sea.’
That’s how the world could end, not with a bang, but a millions-to-one unlucky chance. Rogue nation?

What’s the lesson for Iran in this story? It pays to have a nuke. You get some respect, even a visit from Bill Clinton.

Progressive Illusions: From our first black president to “Our First Black President”

In retrospect we can see what a lucky fellow Barack Obama was to have had, during his run for the presidency last year, a radical black pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as his opponent in an argument about race and racism in America. Obama scored big with whites for his measured put-down of Wright as the embittered voice from an angry past, now being thankfully overtaken by a mellower and more sensible age of racial reason. And in an added irony, the most supportive black voice for this hopeful posture was that of the Harvard prof, Henry Louis Gates, who shot into the headlines last month after being arrested by a white Cambridge cop,

Sergeant James Crowley, for allegedly abusing Crowley for racist conduct. In an amazing lapse in his usual steely self control, Obama said in a press conference that he thought the cops had acted “stupidly” in this incident which began when a neighbor called the police saying two men were trying to break into the house. Actually this was Gates and his driver trying to recoup from that familiar misfortune, the missing front door key of Gates’ own home.

The irony stems from the fact, as Ishmael Reed, author of two marvelously acrid and funny pieces on the Gates affair on this site, points out that Gates had become the darling of white liberals for putting down blacks in exactly the same manner as Obama had adopted with Wright. In the New Yorker and kindred outlets Gates would serve up anodyne pottage about race being “a social construct” and would whack deadbeat black dads, cuing Obama to the same sort of grandstanding, all of which fell like music upon the ears of white opinion-formers always receptive to black people prepared to utter “difficult truths” - viz., that blacks – African Americans – had and have only themselves to blame for most if not all of their problems. The presiding deity over this nonsense for many years was the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who won hundreds of admiring editorials in the New York Times for his supposed courage and intellectual integrity in serving up “difficult truths” to white Americans eager for scholarly reassurance that they had nothing to apologize for.

Then suddenly here were Gates and Obama both catching a torrent of abuse from whites for shouting at white cops and calling them racists and stupid. We can safely stipulate here that a very large number of white cops are violence-prone racists, both by upbringing and by assigned role, since they are the whites’ first line of defense, furnished with awesome firepower, complicit prosecutors, indulgent forensic laboratories, mostly-white juries and a mostly-white press in the endless battle to keep the dangerous classes generally and the blacks specifically in their place. If the job requires you to be “stupid” – by over-reacting to the level of shooting an elderly black woman holding a cellphone on the grounds you thought she was armed and about to shoot to kill – then so be it.

Crowley became the overnight darling of the right-wing Talk Radio and Roundtable TV hosts, just as Joe the Plumber did last fall. Obama’s senior aides, aghast at the uproar which took the big battle over health insurance off the front pages, successfully urged Obama to say that Gates might have acted unreasonably and to recapture the high ground by inviting Gates and Crowley to the White House for a manly beer and constructive chat, duly hailed in its aftermath last Wednesday by the President as “friendly, thoughtful and positive.” It would have required Gates and Crowley to be carried out on stretchers after bloody combat for Obama to have said anything else.

The entire event was positive only for Crowley. Cops are notorious liars in the accounts they give to prosecutors, juries or the press of their conduct as guardians of the peace, and Crowley’s account of what happened chez Gates had plenty of improbabilities in it, such as his claim that Gates uttered a slur about his, Crowley’s, mother. Boston and Cambridge has been suffused with acrid racist divisions for decades, and the cops there have ugly reputations, as vividly evoked by the Boston cop, Justin Barrett, who was fired by the city’s mayor for calling prof Gates “a banana eating jungle bunny”. Barrett and his lawyer are suing the city and the mayor for damages for causing him “pain and suffering, mental anguish, emotional distress, post-traumatic stress, sleeplessness, indignities and embarrassment, degradation, injusry to reputation and restriction on his personal freedom.” Barrett’s lawyer says “banana-eating jungle bunny” were terms used by his client to evoke Gates’ words, not his African American essence. Barrett told Larry King he doesn’t know what made him say that.

White America is never more vividly and comically racist than when trying to excuse impromptu racist utterance or deny the racism of American society , which is manifest in every number, every graph and scatterplot in the annual Statistical Abstract of the United States. It was a former governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis, regarded as an impeccable progressive in matters of race, who denied any racist motive for launching his final presidential drive in 1988 by appearing at the Neshoba county fair in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in the 1960s and where Reagan wooed the white south in 1980.The great and courageous black attorney, J.L. Chestnut, one of two black people in the huge audience, recalled Reagan crying that “ ‘ the South will rise again and this time remain master of everybody and everything within its dominion.’ The square came to life, the Klu Kluxers were shouting, jeering and in obvious ecstasy. God bless America." So eight years later Dukakis visited the Fair, to give the white voters a tacit message. It didn’t do him any good. His campaign blew up amid race-baiting first by his Democratic rival Al Gore, who denounced Dukakis for giving a weekend furlough from prison to a black criminal called Willie Horton. George Bush Sr soundly whacked Dukakis using the same charges.

White progressives have been cheering Obama’s “tough love” homilies to delinquent black dads, content that he spared white or Spanish dads any such reproof. Maybe the support for Sergeant Crowley and the vilification Obama and Gates will come as a wake-up call, though I doubt it. Bill Clinton was probably the most disastrous president for blacks in postwar history, in terms of criminal justice policies, removal of social safety nets and systematic vilification of young black mothers for having babies (at an optimal time for the babies’ care and survival ). Yet if you call Bill worse as an effective racist than Reagan they’ll quack with incredulous raillery and remind you that it was a black writer, Toni Morrison, who called Clinton our first black president. So? It was Gen. Colin Powell who stepped up to criticize Gates and thus endorse Crowley. Can we hope Gates has learned a lesson? Nope. He’s back at his crowd-pleasing antics, pledging more beers with Crowley and seeing he’ll see what he can do about getting his kids into Harvard. Ishmael Reed asked caustically here, “Maybe the officer who killed a black man in Oakland the other night should send in her children’s application to Gates. Is Gates a candidate for the Stockholm Syndrome?” Scarcely a candidate, Ishmael. Stockholm Syndrome captured Prof Gates long, long ago and did his career no end of good.

New York Times Director Probed for “Breach of Trust”

To the Sulzberger family that controls the New York Times he has been the ultimate Good German. High-flying Thomas Middelhof took New York by storm, buying Random House for Bertelsmann, invited onto the NYT board, a member of its compensation committee. Read Eamonn Fingleton’s exclusive on how Middelhof  has crashed to earth and how the NYT has buried the story. Amid New York’s savage fiscal crisis, guess what? The city ponies up $50 million for a nice new park for rich people in Manhattan. Read Carl Ginsburg on the High Line. PLUS Elyssa Pachico on how rural revolution in Colombia has gone digital. PLUS co-editor Cockburn on how, in Obama Time, the Israel lobby is carrying all before it. What a surprise.

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Alexander Cockburn can be reached at alexandercockburn@asis.com

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