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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.
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September
26, 2003
Vanishing Act
"Disappearing"
the Republic at the Push of a Button
By CHRIS FLOYD
It's a shell game, with money, companies and corporate
brands switching in a blur of buy-outs and bogus fronts. It's
a sinkhole, where mobbed-up operators, paid-off public servants,
crazed Christian fascists, CIA shadow-jobbers, war-pimping arms
dealers--and presidential family members--lie down together in
the slime. It's a hacker's dream, with pork-funded, half-finished,
secretly-programmed computer systems installed without basic
security standards by politically-partisan private firms, and
protected by law from public scrutiny.
It's how America, the "world's greatest
democracy," casts its votes. And it's why George W. Bush
will almost certainly be the next president of the United States--no
matter what the people of the United States might want.
The American vote-count is controlled
by three major corporate players--Diebold, ES&S, and Sequoia--with
a fourth, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC),
coming on strong. These companies--all of them hardwired into
the Bushist Party power grid--have been given billions of dollars
by the Bush Regime to complete a sweeping computerization of
voting machines nation-wide by the 2004 election. These glitch-riddled
systems--many using "touch-screen" technology that
leaves no paper trail at all--are almost laughably open to manipulation,
according to corporate whistleblowers and computer scientists
at Stanford, John Hopkins and other universities.
The technology had a trial run in the
2002 mid-term elections. In Georgia, serviced by new Diebold
systems, a popular Democratic governor and senator were both
unseated in what the media called "amazing" upsets,
with results showing vote swings of up to 16 percent from the
last pre-ballot polls. In computerized Minnesota, former vice
president Walter Mondale--a replacement for popular incumbent
Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash days before the vote--was
also defeated in a large last-second vote swing. Convenient "glitches"
in Florida saw an untold number of votes intended for the Democratic
candidate registering instead for Governor Jeb "L'il Brother"
Bush. A Florida Democrat who lost a similarly "glitched"
local election went to court to have the computers examined--but
the case was thrown out by a judge who ruled that the innards
of America's voting machines are the "trade secrets"
of the private companies who make them.
Who's behind these private companies?
It's hard to tell: the corporate lines--even the bloodlines--of
these "competitors" are so intricately mixed. For example,
at Diebold--whose corporate chief, Wally O'Dell, a top Bush fundraiser,
has publicly committed himself to "delivering" his
home state's votes to Bush next year--the election division is
run by Bob Urosevich. Bob's brother, Todd, is a top executive
at "rival" ES&S. The brothers were originally staked
in the vote-count business by Howard Ahmanson, a member of the
Council for National Policy, a right-wing "steering group"
stacked with Bushist faithful.
Ahmanson is also one of the bagmen behind
the "Christian Reconstructionist" movement, an extremist
faction that openly advocates a theocratic takeover of American
democracy, with the imposition of strict Christian dominion,
placing "the state, the school, the arts and sciences, law,
economics, and every other sphere under Christ the King."
This "dominion" includes the death penalty for homosexuals,
exclusion of citizenship for non-Christians, stoning of sinners
and--we kid you not--slavery, "one of the most beneficent
of Biblical laws." As the movement's leader--and Ahmanson's
fellow CNP member--R.J. Rushdoony puts it: "The Christian
should therefore not fear laws in support of Christian social
goals just because they interfere with personal freedom."
Ahmanson also holds a major stake in
ES&S, where he's joined by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel.
Before his ascension to high office, Hagel was CEO of an earlier
ES&S incarnation. Thus, when he ran for the Senate, his own
company counted the votes. Needless to say, his initial victory
was reported as "an amazing upset." Hagel still has
a million-dollar stake in the parent company of ES&S. In
Florida, Jeb Bush's first choice for a running mate in his 1998
gubernatorial race was ES&S lobbyist Sandra Mortham, who
made a mint installing the machines that counted Jeb's votes.
Sequoia also has a colorful history,
most recently in Louisiana, where it was the center of a massive
corruption case that sent top state officials to jail for bribery,
most of it funneled through Mob-connected front firms. Sequoia
executives were also indicted, but escaped trial after giving
immunized testimony against state officials. The company's corporate
parent is the UK communications and printing firm De La Rue,
which even as we speak is churning out the colonial currency
notes for the new Iraq, courtesy of a hefty Coalition contract.
De La Rue, in turn, is owned by the private equity firm Madison
Dearborn--a partner of the Carlyle Group, where George Bush I
makes millions trolling the world for war pork, privatizations
and sweetheart deals with government insiders.
Investigations by Bev Harris, Thom Hartmann
and many others have forced some of these concerns about computer
voting into the edge of the mainstream. Maryland, for example,
was so worried about its fat new contract with Diebold that it
hired another company to vet the software: SAIC. On the surface,
this seems a bit like asking Pepsi to certify the taste of Coke,
as top SAIC executives have now spun off into the vote-counting
game. These include former CEO Admiral Bill Owens--former military
aide to Dick Cheney and Carlyle honcho Frank Carlucci--and ex-CIA
director Robert Gates, of Iran-Contra fame. Another SAIC executive,
David Kay, has been hired by the Bushists to "find"
Iraq's elusive weapons of mass destruction. SAIC's long history
of fraud charges and security lapses in its electronic systems
hasn't prevented it from becoming one of the largest contractors
for the Pentagon and the CIA--and it will doubtless pose little
obstacle to its entrance into election engineering.
The mad rush to install unverifiable
computer voting is driven by the Help America Vote Act, signed
by Bush last year. The chief lobbying group pushing for HAVA
was a consortium of arms dealers--those disinterested corporate
citizens--including Northop-Grumman and Lockheed-Martin. The
bill also mandates that all states adopt the computerized "voter
purge" system used by Florida's Jeb Bush to eliminate 91,000
eligible black voters from the rolls in November 2000.
This was done by a private firm, the Republican-run ChoicePoint
Inc., which delivered a list of supposedly "ineligible"
voters--identified by race--to Florida officials. ChoicePoint
was supposed to help local officials correct any mistakes, but
despite taking several million dollars for this task, they somehow
neglected to do it. Now Bush's HAVA requires that all states
conduct similar operations--and no points for guessing which
Republican-run private firm is gobbling up the lion's share of
those contracts. (This gives a whole new meaning to the term
"whitewash").
The unelected Bush Regime now controls
the government, the military, the judiciary--and the machinery
of democracy itself. Absent some unlikely great awakening by
the co-opted dullards of the corporate media, next November the
last shreds of a genuine American republic will disappear--at
the push of a button.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. His CounterPunch piece on Rumsfeld's
plan to provoke terrorist attacks came in at Number 4
on Project Censored's final tally of the Most Censored stories
of 2002. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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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