Closing Guantanamo a return to America's values

Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, January 28, 2009

All but the most far-gone adepts of the Chicken Little Right have long understood the need to shut down the notorious prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The damage done to U.S. prestige has been incalculable, enabling its enemies to portray America's vaunted commitment to democratic values, human rights and the rule of law as a sham.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates long has advocated closing Guantanamo. As President Obama signed the executive order last week, he was surrounded by sixteen retired admirals and generals who'd urged the action. Major General Paul Eaton, who has a son on duty in the Middle East, told The New Yorker's Jane Mayer that "torture is the tool of the lazy, the stupid, and the pseudo-tough. It's also perhaps the greatest recruiting tool that the terrorists have."

This last point can't be stressed enough. By turning tyrant and bully, the Bush administration forfeited the moral high ground, no doubt creating a hundred Islamic extremists for every one incarcerated at Guantanamo.

Incapable of admitting error, the previous administration preferred sophomoric debates about the existence of evil and the brutality of war. So it should surprise nobody that some Republicans appeared to see closing Guantanamo as a chance to plant a partisan time bomb under the Obama White House.

Former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney spent much of their last week in office taking credit for something that didn't happen; possibly because many things that did don't exactly redound to their glory.

Cheney expressed no regrets whatsoever. He told CBS News that, thanks to the Bush administration, "the thing that I feel most strongly about is this question of how we've managed to keep the nation safe from further terrorist attacks for the last seven and a half years." Fair enough, although al-Qa'ida's top leadership remains at large. The purpose of terrorism isn't military victories; it's political and psychological.

Bush warned that closing Guantanamo could be dangerous. "You've got a bunch of cold-blooded killers down there," he said, "that, if they ever get out, they're going to come and kill Americans. And I'd hate to be the person that made that decision."

Marc A. Thiessen, a former Bush speechwriter, made the threat explicit in a Washington Post column: "If terrorists strike our country again, Americans will hold Obama responsible-and the Democratic Party could find itself unelectable for a generation." How's that for elevating party over country? What if the Clinton administration, which also prevented terrorist attacks on U.S. soil after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had taken such a stance?

On cue, media accounts began to appear claiming that detainees released from Guantanamo have returned to terrorist activities. Several points need to be made. First, it's not Obama who set these men free; it was the Bush administration. Second, it's already known that some Guantanamo detainees are guilty of no crimes against the U.S, of which the best-known are 17 ethnic Uighurs (Chinese Muslims) imprisoned because it's feared they'd be tortured or executed if sent home.

Third, it's unclear how many of the rest are like an Afghan boy named Mohammed Jawad, captured at age 15, who signed a confession written in Farsi, a language he neither speaks nor reads. Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld was the government's leading prosecutor until he became persuaded there was no credible evidence, and resigned his commission to urge the boy's release.

Finally, the United States and other civilized countries have been trying and convicting genuine terrorists in courts of law for a generation. They're incarcerated in maximum security prisons all over the civilized world. This isn't a vampire movie, where armies of superhuman foes march impervious to harm. A strong, confident nation can defeat al-Qa'ida without shaming ourselves.

Addendum

In a "Voices" letter Lonnie Hill of Fayetteville challenges me to explain a "discrepancy" in a column about bad intelligence leading up to the Iraq war. He claims I cited the British government's "Downing Street Memo" to prove that the Bush administration "fixed" evidence of Iraq's (non-existent) WMDs.

The word "fixed" wasn't mine. Here's what the column did say.

"According to the once-secret 'Downing Street Memo,' written by a British intelligence official to Prime Minister Blair about top level meetings with Bush administration officials in July 2002, 'Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.'

"Instances of intelligence being "stovepiped," i.e. stripped of uncertainties and dissenting views, have been widely reported. . . . Bush, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice made lurid public statements about 'mushroom clouds' and the like they eventually had to retract. At minimum, they were blowing smoke, substituting ideology for facts."

Rather, I'm afraid, like Mr. Hill himself.

· -–––––·–––––-Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a लिटिल Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

Barack Obama's teachable moment
Gene Lyons

Exit the make-believe Texas cowboy, smirking and whining.

Until last week, the most telltale moment of the Bush administration had
involved not the president, but his mother.

Touring the Houston Astrodome, where thousands of New Orleans flood
victims had taken shelter after Hurricane Katrina, former first lady
Barbara Bush worried aloud that the refugees might want to stay in
Texas.

"So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged
anyway," she chuckled condescendingly, "this is working very well for
them."

For sheer, smug callousness that was hard to top. True, Republicans of
Mrs. Bush's social set have been railing against the undeserving poor
since 1932; to them, Franklin Delano Roosevelt remains a class traitor.
But they rarely speak so frankly where the servants can hear.

George W. Bush maintained his man of-the-people pose almost until the
end. Facing history, however, he got twitchy and defensive. Granted,
it's hard to know how a president who stampeded the nation into a
disastrous war on a false premise could stand there with a straight face
praising his own understanding of "the power of freedom to be trans
formative" and his "great love for the human-human being, and [belief]
in human dignity."

The mask dropped momentarily, however, when a reporter at his final
press conference asked him about the personal burdens of the presidency.
Affecting a sing-song, sarcastic whine, he lampooned people who imagine
it's a tough job.

"Oh, the burdens, you know," he sneered. "Why did the financial collapse
have to happen on my watch?"

Bush probably thought he sounded "tough." But to anybody who spent time
on Ivy League campuses in the Sixties, his was a familiar pose: the Frat
House Hipster, too cool to care. President Punk. Oh, so you're broke and
out of a job? Well, he's not. You seem to have mistaken me, Bush all but
announced to the nation, for somebody who gives a s***.

The wonder is that polls show that somewhere between 22 and 27 percent
of the public continues to view Bush favorably. Abraham Lincoln said,
"You can fool some of the people all of the time." Now we know how many:
roughly one quarter.

Meanwhile, Dick Cheney assured PBS' Jim Lehrer that Saddam Hussein and
al-Qa'ida were definitely in cahoots and all but bragged about torture.
Oh, and Bush economic policies were a big success. The former vice
president's approval rating's at 13 percent, but he doesn't believe
polls. No wonder they kept him out of sight.

All right, enough of that. As tempting as it is to lampoon the personal
shortcomings of the Bush wrecking crew, it's also a distraction. Because
they didn't merely fail as individuals, they failed as Republicans. And
did so, President Obama needs to keep reminding people, because GOP
ideology, particularly with regard to economics and foreign policy, has
drifted ever further from reality.

That's not to say that Obama's calls for bipartisanship, some of which
are making infatuated supporters nervous, are wholly mistaken. By
signaling an intention to reform Social Security and Medicare, he's
frightened some who fear that bipartisanship invariably means slashing
benefits-mainly because that's what it means to lazy-minded Beltway
pundits constantly preaching "moderation."

In his pungent column at mediamatters.org, Jamison Foser calls this
"centrist dogma": the idea that the best solution invariably lies midway
between two extremes. The problem is that when one party's dead wrong,
as Republicans have been wrong on virtually every economic issue for a
generation, that kind of compromise is folly. Imagine where we'd be
today, for example, had Bush succeeded in privatizing Social Security.

What Obama's got here is a teachable moment, an opportunity to apply his
formidable pedagogical skills. He's already said that reforming Social
Security is "easy"-simply remove the cap on payroll taxes on persons
earning over $200,000 a year and the program can be self sustaining
indefinitely. Compromise? Maybe raise age limits slightly to give
moderate Republicans cover.

The point is to bring aboard those members of the opposition willing to
deal with reality. Let the rest walk around Washington wearing
signboards printed at the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage
Foundation or any of the other tycoon-funded propaganda shops dedicated
to rationalizing tax cuts for multimillionaires above all else.

Medicare's tougher. The simplest fix would be to make it universal. As
that's probably a political impossibility, Obama must keep pointing out
that simply cutting benefits would produce a cascade of bad effects. The
answer lies in increased efficiency through universal health insurance,
which also would greatly improve the competitive position of U.S. auto
companies, for example.

Bipartisanship, then, involves personal civility, repeatedly emphasizing
that we Americans are all in this mess together and soliciting ideas
from Republicans willing to brave the wrath of Rush Limbaugh. It
certainly doesn't mean occupying the middle ground between wisdom and
folly.

· -–––––·–––––-Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author
and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

Obama’s libel against the American people

23 January 2009

The phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech that have evoked the greatest enthusiasm across the political spectrum of the US establishment, from the Republican right to liberal Democrats, were those suggesting that the American people are responsible for the present economic catastrophe. “Our economy is badly weakened,” he declared, “a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.”

Precisely what those “hard choices” are Obama did not specify, but he made clear they in no way involve a challenge to the capitalist market system, declaring that “its power to generate wealth and expand freedom is unmatched.”

He broadly hinted that the “hard choices” he would make involve sweeping cuts in social programs, including ending programs that don’t’ “work.” This policy of austerity, which, as he had previously indicated, would include cuts in bedrock programs such as Social Security and Medicare, was summed up in his call for “a new era of responsibility.”

The implicit demand for greater sacrifice from the American people was hailed by liberal commentators such as the Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who praised Obama for telling the people that the crisis was “partly our fault.” He continued, “We all know the Pogo line about how ‘we have met the enemy, and he is us.’ Obama implicitly seemed to embrace it.”

Right-wing columnist George Will in his Washington Post op-ed piece enthused over the same lines, writing that one of Obama’s themes “was that Americans do not just have a problem, they are a problem.”

These approving comments accurately sum up the deeply reactionary and deceitful thrust of Obama’s speech, behind its “I feel your pain” rhetoric. Obama’s attempt to foist the blame for the failure of American capitalism on the American people is nothing short of a libel, the purpose of which is to obscure those social interests that are really responsible for the unfolding catastrophe and justify even deeper attacks on the working class.

The working class bears no responsibility for the collapse of the financial system and the resulting recession that is developing into a full-scale depression. Working people have no control over the policies and actions of the multimillionaires and billionaires who bestride Wall Street. They had no say in concocting the Ponzi schemes that generated multimillion-dollar compensation packages and colossal personal fortunes for the financial aristocracy until they collapsed, as they were bound to.

Working people are the victims of the maniacal greed of the corporate-financial elite, which itself is an expression of fundamental contradictions within the irrational economic system over which they preside. One would think from Obama’s remarks that the broad masses of people in the US have been living the good life. In reality, for three solid decades they have seen their social position decline and their living standards deteriorate as an ever-greater share of the national wealth was funneled into the bank accounts of the ruling elite.

The single most significant feature of American life—the staggering growth of social inequality—went without mention in Obama’s speech. He could not allude to it and at the same time accuse the people of bearing “collective” guilt.

Obama’s single fleeting reference to corporate criminality—“greed and irresponsibility on the part of some”—was itself a cover-up. On the part of “some”? The virtual collapse of the US and global economy is not the result of a few bad apples or mere aberrational behavior. Fraud, incompetence, recklessness were—and remain—pervasive and systemic in American capitalism.

This is a system that for decades has starved and dismantled basic industry, allowed the social infrastructure to rot and driven down the living standards of the majority of the population in order to generate higher profits for the elite from financial manipulation and speculation. The American ruling class stands exposed and disgraced before the world as a semi-criminal social layer.

Obama’s “new era of responsibility” signifies, in reality, a general amnesty for the system, the class and those in government who are truly responsible for the crisis. None of the bankers and speculators who created a mountain of paper values on the basis of predatory home loans that were bound to fail are to be held accountable. Nor are the government regulators who ran interference and served as their accomplices. Likewise, the congressmen of both parties who dismantled regulations and slashed corporate taxes in exchange for campaign funds and other bribes.

To name a few names:

• New York Senator Charles Schumer, Democratic chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, who raised $12, 928,000 in the 2003-2008 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics (CPR). His top five industries for campaign cash were securities and investment, lawyers and law firms, real estate, miscellaneous finance and commercial banks, from which he netted a total of $3,937,000. His top five contributing firms were Citigroup, UBS, Weiss et al, Kosowitz, Benson et al and Metlife, which funneled a total of $271,000 to his campaigns.

As head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the last four years, Schumer has increased donations from Wall Street by 50 percent. Has raked in over $120 million from Wall Street in recent years.

• Barney Frank, Democratic chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. He raised $2,282,000 in 2007-2008, according to CPR, with his top five contributing industries consisting of securities and investment, real estate, insurance, lawyers and law firms and commercial banks.

• Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s White House chief of staff. After leaving the Clinton administration, he netted $18 million in the three years he was employed by the global investment banking firm of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in Chicago, where he worked from 1999 to 2002.

Then there is Obama himself. A product of the Illinois Democratic Party machine, tied in with financial moguls such as Robert Wolf, CEO of UBS America, and Warren Buffett, the wealthiest individual in the US, the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars in corporate campaign funds and himself a multimillionaire, he personifies the social corruption of the ruling elite in general and the rightward movement of the Democratic Party in particular. His ascendance is the outcome of the turn to identity politics and racial preferences as a means of integrating the black upper-middle-class into the political establishment and suppressing the fundamental class issues in American society.

The prerequisite for establishing genuine “responsibility” is for the working class to demand a full and public accounting for the plundering of the economy and the social misery it has produced. This must include serious investigations of the role of bankers, hedge fund managers, speculators and their accomplices in government and facilitators in the corporate media.

The entire economic and political system must be put on trial, and criminal prosecutions pursued against the main offenders. The fortunes amassed from fraud and swindling must be seized and the wealth stolen from the American people recovered. Such a public accounting is essential to developing a rational and progressive solution to the crisis.

This can be undertaken only on the basis of an independent political movement of the working class fighting for socialist policies, including the nationalization of the banks and basic industry under the democratic control of the working population, in opposition to the ruling elite, its two parties and the capitalist system which they defend.

Barry Grey

Israel to keep troops in Gaza following ceasefire announcement

By David Walsh
19 January 2009

A tense truce presently exists in the Gaza Strip after Israel’s declaration of a unilateral ceasefire Saturday night and Hamas’ announcement of a one-week ceasefire twelve hours later. An undisclosed number of Israeli troops still remain in Gaza however, and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has made clear there was no commitment, nor any timetable for a withdrawal. Nor is there any Israeli commitment to opening Gaza’s borders and ending the devastating blockade.

While some Israeli tanks and armored vehicles withdrew from areas in southern and northern Gaza, Olmert said that Israel reserved “the right to react and renew its military actions” if the Palestinians continued firing rockets into southern Israel.

For their part, Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups announced a temporary ceasefire and stressed their demand for “the withdrawal of the enemy forces from the Gaza Strip within a week, along with the opening of all the crossings for the entry of humanitarian aid, food and other necessities for our people in the Gaza Strip.”

The truce may well be only a pause in the violence.

The Bush administration brokered the ceasefire, with a Friday meeting in Washington between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni playing a critical role. The memorandum of understanding signed by Livni involves promises by the US promising to deploy technical, intelligence and military assets across the Middle East and to enlist NATO and US-allied Arab regimes to help prevent arms getting into Gaza, particularly from Iran.

The agreement is highly ominous. While the Wall Street Journal notes that the memorandum “doesn't call for the US to employ its own troops in the Palestinian territories,” it adds that “US officials compared the scope of the agreement to the Proliferation Security Initiative, a Bush administration program that focuses on interdicting ships and airplanes believed to be trafficking equipment used in developing nuclear weapons and long-range missiles.”

Washington is thus promising to seize Iranian or Syrian ships or airplanes on the pretext that they may be carrying arms to Hamas. The US-Israeli agreement contains the seeds of a new and wider war.

US officials indicated that “the memorandum will remain in effect after Barack Obama is inaugurated next week. Rice said she has been briefing the Obama transition team on the memorandum's implications.” (Journal)

State Department Spokesman Sean McCormack drove home the point, noting that the agreement “commits the United States,” adding that Rice had discussions with incoming Secretary of State Hillary Clinton concerning the issue.

“I think it’s safe to assume that we wouldn't have moved forward if we hadn’t done some careful consultations prior to signing this with the incoming [Obama] folks,” McCormack told the media.

The timing of the Israeli ceasefire and the US-Israeli deal coincides with the eve of the inauguration. It seems clear that the Israelis intended to halt the assault on Gaza, at least temporarily, before Obama took up residence in the White House. It is also clear that the plans being worked out between Israel, the US, Egypt and the European Union to strangle Palestinian resistance and undermine the Hamas government in Gaza have the full support of the incoming US administration.

Olmert also issued a clear threat to Iran and Syria in his ceasefire announcement, declaring that the military operation “proved again the power of Israel and improved its deterrence against those who threaten it.” One of the motives of the brutal offensive was to send a message to Iran in particular, which Israeli officials continually refer to as Hamas’s sponsor.

The international diplomatic effort as a whole is aimed at further isolating and disarming the Gazan population and toppling the Hamas administration, installing in its stead the US-backed and Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. This, however, seems an unlikely outcome given the widespread hatred and disgust among Gazans for the Palestinian Authority of President Mahmoud Abbas. The PA acted throughout the onslaught as the stooge of the Israelis and Americans, violently suppressing demonstrations and protests in the West Bank against the Israeli offensive in Gaza.

European Union officials also play their role in this cynical game. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the British, Italian and Spanish prime ministers Gordon Brown, Silvio Berlusconi and Jose Luis Zapatero and Czech premier Mirek Topolanek met with Egyptian officials first on Sunday and then traveled to Jerusalem for a summit with Olmert.

The European politicians spilled crocodile tears over the deaths of hundreds of Gazan children, without indicting Israel as the guilty party, and spoke strongly in defense of “Israel’s right to protect its citizens from Hamas rockets.” (Reuters)

According to press commentary, the EU-Israeli summit and related diplomatic maneuvers are concentrated on developing effective means of preventing Hamas from “re-arming,” while nothing is being said about opening Gaza’s borders. The blockade and suffocation of Gaza will continue, with US and European support. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the other Arab states also play their part in this dirty business.

With much of Gaza flattened by Israeli bombs and artillery shells, residents came out of shelters and other hiding places Sunday to look at the massive destruction. According to Gaza municipal authorities, approximately 20,000 residential and government buildings were damaged and another 4,000 entirely destroyed. Some 50 of the UN’s 220 schools, clinics and warehouses were shelled or otherwise attacked by the Israelis.

The Palestinian death toll presently stands at more than 1,300, but that is expected to rise. Medics pulled at least 100 bodies, including those of several children, from the rubble Sunday in the Al Tuffah area, Jabal Al Rayyis, Al Kashif, Al Atatra, Al Qarm, Al Zeitoun and Jabaliya. An official of the Palestinian Ministry of Health added that dozens of residents were still missing and presumed dead. The search through the rubble will continue for several days.

According to Hamas medical authorities, the dead include 418 children, 110 women, 120 men over 50, 16 paramedics, 4 reporters and five foreigners.

Foreign journalists, prevented from entering Gaza since the fighting began three weeks ago, got their first glimpse of the carnage Sunday. Correspondent Paul Wood told the BBC “that in the town of Beit Lahiya he saw the first real destruction-streets churned up by Israeli heavy armour, overturned cars, a lake of raw sewage in the street and a mosque left as a charred ruin.”

A Newsweek reporter noted that the “situation was the most dramatic in Gaza City, which Western journalists reached for the first time today… Today the Beach Road opened, and journalists arrived in Gaza City to find scenes of what John Ging, the local head of the UN Relief and Works Agency, described in an interview as ‘destruction on an unimaginable scale.’”

“Parts of the densely populated city looked like Grozny [the capital of Chechnya bombed by Russian forces] on a bad day; one neighborhood, eastern Jabaliya, had nearly every building reduced to a pile of rubble, roofs flattened to the ground-at least 50 of them in close proximity along several blocks. Even relatively untouched neighborhoods had signs of heavy machine gun fire tattooed up and down the walls, with the occasional gaping hole from a tank shell or rocket.”

Israeli atrocities continued up to the declaration of the ceasefire and beyond. In the hours after the declaration of a truce, Israeli troops shot dead an eight-year-old girl in the northern town of Beit Hanoun and a 20-year-old man near the southern town of Khan Yunis.

On January 15, the Israeli air force bombed and set ablaze the Al-Quds hospital in a southwestern district of Gaza City, where some 500 people were sheltering. According to Al Jazeera, hospital officials said the fire was sparked by a “phosphorus shell.” Two hospitals east of the city were also hit by shells Thursday.

The Israelis continued their policy of targeting Palestinian leaders until the final days of the current round of fighting, assassinating Hamas’s interior minister, Said Siam, on Thursday. The death prompted a mass rally at his funeral on Friday.

On Friday an Israeli strike hit the home of a Palestinian doctor, Izzeldin Abuelaish, who had been giving reports to Israeli television on conditions in Gaza over the past three weeks, and killed three of his daughters and a niece. The news program went on the air as the doctor was attempting to save the girls’ lives.

Also on Friday, a mother and five of her children were killed by an Israeli tank shell in the al-Bureij refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, witnesses and

medics said. The children were reportedly aged 7 to 12 and the mother was 30 years old.

On Saturday, two brothers, five and seven, were killed in a tank attack on a UN school in Beit Lahiya. Their mother lost both her legs in the attack and subsequently died. The boys and their mother had been sheltering from repeated Israeli air strikes over the northern Gaza Strip.

Britain’s Daily Mirror reported: “[P]ictures clearly showed a marked UN vehicle outside the building while terrified locals sprinted for cover as a hail of fire rained down, seriously injuring 13 others.”

John Ging of the UN Relief and Works Agency commented: “These two little boys are as innocent, indisputably, as they are dead. The question now being asked is: Is this and the killing of all other innocent civilians in Gaza a war crime?”

Another UNRWA spokesman, Christopher Gunness, told reporters: “Gaza is unique in the annals of contemporary suffering in that it is a conflict with a fence around it. There is nowhere safe to flee.”

Gunness said the UN would call for a war crimes investigation.

According to Palestinian sources, bombings of UN facilities have killed nearly 50 people in Israel's three-week long offensive in the Gaza Strip.

A UN official, cited in the Sydney Morning Herald January 19, claimed that Israel deliberately blocked the building up of vital food supplies before the launch of its war against Hamas. The UN’s chief humanitarian coordinator in Israel, former Australian diplomat Maxwell Gaylard, accused the Zionist regime of failing to honor its promise to open its border with Gaza during several months of truce from June 19 last year.

“The Israelis would not let us facilitate a regular and sufficient flow of supplies into the Strip.” For four or five months, according to Gaylard, “up to even 19 December, less of our supplies and spare parts and items of equipment… got in than before the 19^th of June.”

This policy, both a provocation against Hamas and part of a plan to make certain that supplies ran out once the fighting began, is further evidence that the murderous Israeli assault, far from an act of 'self-defense’ in response to rocket attacks in December, was planned well in advance.

New Today ---------- 14 January 2009

Perspective
-----------------------------------------------------
Obama, Bush team up behind another $350 billion for the banks
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/pers-j14.shtml

News & Analysis
-----------------------------------------------------
Israeli military escalates assault on Gaza City
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/gaza-j14.shtml

Israel’s war on Gaza and the role of the Middle East bourgeoisie
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/mide-j14.shtml

No fanfare to mark 30 years of China’s market reform
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/chin-j14.shtml

Greek prime minister reshuffles cabinet
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/gree-j14.shtml

Australian government calls for wage cuts to “save jobs”
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/auem-j14.shtml

German navy in operations off Somalia
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/germ-j14.shtml

France: Dray scandal hits student, anti-racist groups
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/dray-j14.shtml

Perspective
-----------------------------------------------------
Obama signals continuity with US torture regime
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/pers-j13.shtml

News & Analysis
-----------------------------------------------------
The New York Times and the Gaza crisis: Israeli war propaganda in the guise of news
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/nyt-j13.shtml

Protests denounce Israeli assault on Gaza and Canadian government complicity
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/cana-j13.shtml

Sri Lankan death squads kill editor and ransack TV station
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/sril-j13.shtml

SEP and ISSE public lecture in Sri Lanka
World economic crisis and the perspective of Marxism
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/meet-j13.shtml

Merkel’s stimulus package: a pact with German big business
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/merk-j13.shtml

Eighth Australian soldier dies in Afghanistan amid calls to boost troop numbers
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/aust-j13.shtml

Further slump in Turkey’s industrial output
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/turk-j13.shtml

US: Carbon monoxide deaths on the rise as economy sours
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/mono-j13.shtml