Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
25, 2003
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
Recent
Stories
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
|
September
25, 2003
War as Entertainment
Wolfowitz
at the New School
By SARAH FERGUSON
You have to give Paul Wolfowitz some credit. It's
not every deputy secretary of defense who can inspire more than
1,000 New Yorkers to queue up on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon
just to hear a wonk speak. (Does anyone even remember who held
that job under Clinton?) But then, few deputy defense secretaries
have ever wielded as much power or aroused so much ire as "Wolfowitz
of Arabia," the key intellectual architect for the Bush
administration's war on Iraq.
It was Wolfowitz who immediately after
the 9/11 attacks insisted that the Iraqi regime had to be overthrown
as part of a global war on terror, arguing that the fall of Saddam
would spark a chain reaction of democracy rippling across the
region and help usher peace to the Middle East.
Wolfowitz may still have faith in this
fantasy, but with Americans growing increasingly anxious over
the mounting casualties and skyrocketing costs in Iraq, he and
other Administration officials have been waging a rearguard PR
battle to defend the war. And the fact that Wolfowitz agreed
to be interviewed yesterday by New Yorker staffer Jeffrey Goldberg
at a free forum at the New School in the heart of liberal Greenwich
Village was in many ways a measure of how far the White House
is willing to go to appear accountable to its critics.
Predictably, "Wolfy" drew boos,
hisses, and some persistent heckling by a small but bellicose
group of protesters who managed to make it past the heavy security
check (more than half the audience was turned away due to lack
of space).
"Sieg Heil, you Nazi son of a bitch!"
one man screamed before being forcibly ejected by security guards,
the first of six hecklers to get the boot. But their Tourette's-like
outbursts of "Liar!" and "War Criminal!"
or even "Free Mumia!" only seemed to win sympathy for
Wolfowitz from the mostly liberal crowd, many of whom said they'd
come in hopes of hearing him make his case for the war "unfiltered"
by the media. "Take some medication!" shot back one
annoyed woman, drawing a round of applause and laughter.
A former political science professor,
Wolfowitz looked on with bemused smile, no doubt more than happy
to find Goldberg's polite probing on issues like the missing
weapons of mass destruction deflected by all the wacko interruptions.
In contrast to the Administration's previously tight-lipped,
love-it-or-leave-it stance on the war, in the past month, Cheney,
Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz have been making the rounds before Congress
and on talk shows, attempting to save face as they backtrack
on key positions. But the PR blitz has done more to muddy the
waters than clear them. First Cheney suggested on Meet the Press
that there was a possible link between Saddam Hussein and the
attacks of 9/11. Then Bush acknowledged his administration had
in fact found no link between Iraq and 9/11.
Wolfowitz did little to clarify things.
When asked by Goldberg whether he was "fuzzing the line
between groups which pose a global terror threat," like
Al Qaeda, and "regional actors" like Saddam, who, Goldberg
noted, had given support to militant groups like Hamas, Islamic
Jihad, and the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, Wolfowitz
replied, "I think it's the terrorists who are fuzzing the
lines. The lines between these groups are very furry."
Saying that it would be a mistake to
limit the fight to Bin Laden and his followers, Wolfowitz maintained,
"The lesson of 9-11 is that there is an interlocking network
of groups which has the potential to do enormous harm."
Later he asserted that "Iraq, by the way, did have contacts
with Al Qaeda, though we don't know how clear they were"-
an admission that drew more snickers from the crowd.
(The only specific tie Wolfowitz offered
was the now-familiar example of Abu Mussab al Zarqawi, the alleged
Al Qaeda planner from Jordan who reportedly went to Baghdad to
have his leg amputated. Although Powell citied him in his UN
speech prior to the war, the US government has never established
any link between Saddam Hussein and Zarqawi's alleged terror
network.)
Last May Wolfowitz made headlines around
the world when a Vanity Fair reporter quoted him blaming "bureaucratic
reasons" within the US government as the reason why the
Bush Administration made the threat of Iraq's WMD its primary
justification for going to war. Both Wolfowitz and the Pentagon
immediately cried foul, claiming his remarks had been misquoted
and taken out of context. At yesterday's forum, Wolfowitz again
insisted that the decision to go to war was based on a combination
of three factors: the threat of Iraq's WMD, its nightmarish
human rights record, and Iraq's connections to terrorism.
But Wolfowitz did little to dispel the
notion that Iraq's WMD capabilities were exaggerated for political
reasons. Indeed, this time he seemed to put the blame on the
UN's bureaucracy: "Basically, what happened is people
said the UN will give you a resolution on weapons of mass destruction
but not human rights, not [Iraq's support for] terrorism,"
he said, then accused America's former allies (<a.k.a>.
Old Europe) of "avoiding" human rights.
The threat of Iraq's WMD, Wolfowitz suggested,
was simply the easiest thing for all parties to agree on. "I've
rarely seen the intelligence community as unanimous as they were
on the issue of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons,"
he said (apparently ignoring numerous published accounts of dissent
within the State Department and CIA), prompting Goldberg to ask,
"So what happened? Did they just mess up?"
Wolfowitz replied that those with knowledge
of weapons programs were likely still too terrified of having
their family members tortured or killed to come forward. Any
hope of pressing the deputy secretary further during the Q&A
session was largely sandbagged by several young LaRouchies, who
ambushed the mike to preach about the imminent demise of "liberal
imperialist neocon" agenda. When one woman stood up to ask
what Wolfowitz had to say to the families of the American soldiers
who now feel the war was not justified and who are now "living
on food stamps," he snipped, "at least she memorized
the question."
"The wounds of those who died in
combat by letting Iraq go back to the Baathists," Wolfowitz
stated.
Taking issue with those who say the US
has no "endgame" in Iraq, he responded, "The answer
to security in Iraq is fewer American troops and more Iraqis
defending themselves," -- making no mention of a broader
UN role, despite Bush's efforts this week to enlist international
support.
The event closed with a mixture of applause
and shouts of "Resign!" and "Sieg Heil!"
Outside, as several of the ejected hecklers
banged drums and held up a large red "Stop Bush!" banner
with a swastika for the`S', several audience members said they
were disappointed by Wolfowitz's "half-truth" responses,
but gave him credit for sticking it out before a hostile crowd.
"At least it was more entertaining than the Dalai Lama,"
shrugged Jim, a 45-year-old contractor who declined to give his
last name, referring to that other famous person who was speaking
in New York City on Sunday.
Sarah Ferguson
lives in New York and writes for the Village Voice and other
publications. She can be reached at: sferg@interport.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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