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Today's
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October
28, 2003
Chris
White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October
27, 2003
William
A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David
Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine
Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert
Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October
25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October
24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David
Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry
Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
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Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
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
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Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
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A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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October
28, 2003
Authentic Americans
US
Martyrs Pose Questions for Negroponte
By TONI SOLO
If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel,
anti-Americanism is currently the first. The Bush regime uses
it to deceive the United States people while enriching its corporate
buddies. Spreading fear, anxiety, and hatred under the pretext
of fighting terrorism, Bush and his team tear up the US constitution
and pawn the country's future. The McCarthyite suggestion that
a menace exists called "anti-Americanism" is a potent
weapon in the Bush plutocrats' disinformation armoury. It makes
it much harder for rational criticism of US government policy
to be heard--let alone accepted. The sleight of hand is to pretend
that the regime installed in the White House represents the United
States people.
People throughout the Americas know better.
After such long experience of US government aggression, opportunism
and duplicity, maybe they are harder to dupe. As Bolivia tries
to remake itself and the peoples of Venezuela and Colombia gear
up to resist yet more White House sponsored terrorism,1 now may
be a good time to remember some United States citizens who had
a very different vision from that of their government. In Central
America thousands of communities have been victims of terrorist
aggression by the US government or its open support for genocidal
military-dominated regimes in the region. Yet it is in those
places that a more authentic voice of the United States people
has been taken to heart. This truth counteracts the mindless
racism encouraged by the neo-cons' beloved cop out, "anti-americanism".
The assassination
of Ben Linder 2
When Ben Linder was murdered by US government
trained and funded Contra terrorists in 1987 in northern Nicaragua,
he was installing electricity for impoverished rural communities.
At his funeral in Matagalpa, that northern Nicaraguan city overflowed
with mourners for the young man from Portland, Oregon who came
to work for them and finished by dying for them. Writing about
what was needed in order to resist the US terrorist war against
Nicaragua, Linder wrote once "everything you can do should
be done". So, apart from fixing up electrical generating
plant, he also helped with vaccination programs, dressing up
as a clown to amuse parents and children waiting in line, riding
his unicycle, juggling.
How exceptional was Ben Linder? Perhaps
it was his murder that made him an icon for those people determined
to show solidarity with Central American victims of US government
aggression. Tens of thousands of US citizens worked for longer
or shorter periods in Central American countries before and after
Ben Linder. The great majority stayed for brief lengths of time
with poor rural and urban communities in Nicaragua during the
Sandinista revolution. But many others worked long term on human
rights and grass roots community development throughout the region.
Rejecting the racist colonialism practiced
by their governments since the interventions in Cuba and the
Philippines during the war with Spain, these United States citizens
shared an authentically American vision. That vision embraces
as equals and as teachers the diverse peoples of all the Americas.
It is the vision of Simon Bolivar to the sound of the Demajagua
bell3 that day when Carlos Manuel de Cespedes declared an end
to slavery in Cuba and called on all free people to rise up and
resist an earlier vicious, corrupt, ruthless empire.
For people in the United States that
vision has travelled through many diverse filters. But the essential
elements are in common and derive from the ideals that inspired
the French and American revolutions. Successive US governments
have betrayed those ideals around the world, from Central America
to Asia, in Palestine and now in Venezuela. As heroic Rachel
Corrie tragically found out in Palestine, should US citizens
defy their government's policy and defend the most basic humanitarian
norms, so much the worse for them.
US nuns murdered in
El Salvador 4
In 1981, a couple of decades before Rachel
Corrie was murdered, the bodies of four women were found in a
shallow grave in a rural district not far from San Salvador,
El Salvador's capital. They had been raped and shot dead by members
of the Salvadoran army on the orders of senior officers. In the
context of the time, the atrocity would hardly have merited reporting.
But the women were United States citizens. Two were religious
sisters of the New York based Maryknoll order, Ita Ford and Maureen
Clarke. One was an Ursuline Sister, Dorothy Kazel, the fourth
a lay missioner, Jean Donovan. By virtue of their nationality,
the story did make the news, just--the back page of the New York
Times, to that paper's eternal shame.
Those four women had helped defend Salvadorans
from the terror unleashed against their own people by the Salvadoran
government with support from the United States administrations
of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. They gave their lives working
alongside vulnerable people and communities in El Salvador. The
murders followed the assassination in 1980 of Salvadoran Archbishop
Oscar Romero. The women's deaths were manipulated by the US government
and its ever-pliant news media. The full facts took years to
emerge. US ambassador to the UN, Jean Kirkpatrick, falsely accused
the women of having supported the Salvadoran armed opposition,
the FMLN. In fact, the four women were passionate advocates of
non-violence, accompanying the rural villagers they served while
caught up in a violent civil war.
Ambassador Kirkpatrick's statements on
the case of the four women were to be expected from an unrepentant
supporter of the bloodthirsty Argentinian military dictatorship.
Her successor at the UN was Vernon Walters, former deputy director
of the CIA, co-organiser of the continent wide terrorist blueprint
Plan Condor and promoter of Ronald Reagan's terrorist war against
Nicaragua. In 1986 Vernon Walters threw in the face of the UN
his government's rejection of the International Court of Justice
verdict convicting the US of terrorism against Nicaragua.
Kirkpatrick's and Walters' apologetics
for mass murder helped John Negroponte, then US ambassador to
Honduras, cover up his support for the systematic forced disappearances
used to destroy Honduran civilian opposition to the presence
of Contra bases in their country. Thomas Pickering, US ambassador
to El Salvador at the time, also gave misleading information
on local army and paramilitary murders, probably an essential
qualification for his subsequent posting in 1989 as US ambassador
to the UN, taking over from Vernon Walters.
Jean Kirkpatrick, Vernon Walters, Thomas
Pickering, John Negroponte and other US government representatives
sent clear signals that the local military in El Salvador, Honduras
and Guatemala were to be allowed a free hand by the United States
government to murder tens of thousands of civilians and anyone
who spoke out against the slaughter. Perhaps the defining climax
to the sickening murder campaign came in 1989 when the Salvadoran
army killed six Jesuit academics and two of their domestic staff
at the University of Central America in San Salvador. These crimes
were made possible because the United States government consistently
tried to conceal its institutional role in funding, training
and supporting the military and paramilitary perpetrators. The
Iran-Contra scandal was the culmination of that sustained program
of regional deceit.
James "Guadelupe"
Carney--the dilemma of a socially committed priest 5
Faced with the murderous onslaught of
their own governments, plenty of people in Central America believed
the only practical response was armed resistance. Many others
took the path of non-violent opposition. The tension between
the two responses at a time of widespread savage violence raised
painful moral dilemmas. Someone whose life epitomised those dilemmas
was a Jesuit priest called James Carney. From Minnesota, Carney
was known by his Honduran parishioners as Padre Guadelupe, after
the Mexican indigenous Virgin Mary.
Carney, a World War Two combat veteran,
was forcibly disappeared by the Honduran military in September
1983. Remains exhumed at a former US-Contra military base in
January this year may have been those of the missing priest.
The discovery came after many years of efforts to find out how
he died from the US authorities by Carney's family, the Honduran
government, relatives of other Honduran disappeared victims and
by some US journalists, principally the Baltimore Sun in the
mid-1990s. The US government is involved because senior US embassy
personnel may have authorised Carney's murder.
Arriving in Honduras not long after the
epoch-making Honduran general strike in 1954, Carney worked for
over 20 years in northern Honduras and had taken Honduran nationality.
In 1979 the Honduran government expelled him for his determined
and outspoken support for the Honduran rural poor. He was especially
incensed at CIA intervention in the internal elections of the
most successful ever agricultural cooperative in Honduras, Las
Isletas, subsequently sold to the Standard Fruit company.
In Nicaragua, he met a group of other
Honduran exiles determined to return home and start a campaign
of armed resistance to the military presence in their country
of the Nicaraguan Contra backed by the United States army. Carney
felt he had no choice but to accompany them as their chaplain.
Twenty years ago, he resigned from the Jesuit order and went
back to the country he loved carrying his Bible in his pack.
The armed group crossed into Honduras,
reaching the remote Patuca district in Olancho. Right then the
United States army was on a series of manoeuvres with the Honduran
army known as Big Pine. Following desertions, the small guerilla
column was located. Of its 93 members, over 70 were killed. Most
were captured, interrogated under torture and then murdered.
Prevarication and
cover up
And that was James Carney's fate too.
As Carney's friend Fr. Joe Mulligan is quoted as saying, "If
James Carney was captured by Honduran troops, before killing
him I think the Honduran officials would have looked for a wink
or a nod of approval from someone in the U.S. government or from
the CIA."6 That suspicion is supported by the January 1998
report of the Honduran government's Human Rights Commission.
The Commission, under Leo Valladares, reported in detail on its
efforts to obtain information from various offices of the United
States government.
In March and August of 1997, after years
of prevarication and disingenuous manoeuvring, US government
officials made available some of the documentation. Over 50%
of it was blacked out. Valladares and his team found themselves
examining page after page of erasures. The insulting farce Valladares
was subjected to confirms the US government and John Negroponte
have plenty to hide. Honduran government requests for information
from the Argentinian government, whose military trained the Contra
in Honduras, also drew a blank.
The report by Valladares records various
accounts by witnesses indicating the presence of US army and
CIA personnel during Carney's capture and interrogation. It is
inconceivable that Carney would have been murdered without the
knowledge of senior embassy officials back in the Honduran capital
Tegucigalpa. No wonder so much of the evidence was erased and
put beyond perusal.
How high in the embassy hierarchy does
the cover up reach? Given the circumstances of the time, suspicion
points firmly to John Negroponte himself. Valladares' report
cites testimony from a witness taken seriously by the Inter-American
Court of Human Rights in a test case judgement in 1989 condemning
the Honduran government for four crimes of forced disappearance.
The witness, a member of the Battalion 3-16 death squad, alleged
that General Alvarez Martinez, then head of the Honduran armed
forces, personally interrogated James Carney.
Alvarez and Negroponte worked closely
together through 1982 and 1983 consolidating a national security
state in Honduras so as to provide a secure base for the Contra
war against Nicaragua. If the information in Valladares report
is true, Negroponte certainly was aware that Carney had been
captured. Did he turn a blind eye while a United States citizen
was tortured and murdered? Or did he actually authorize it?
Who really represents
the United States?
With this history, it is fitting that
the Bush regime's ambassador to the UN should be John Negroponte.
Few are better qualified than he to dissemble and justify current
policies of murder, terror and torture by the current US government
and its proxies around the world. Apart from the many thousands
of murdered civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of innocent
immigrants are in detention in the US itself, victims of racist
propaganda and political expediency. The inmates of Guantanamo
Camp X-Ray suffer a worse fate, along with an unknown number
of detainees in US bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Diego Garcia and
elsewhere.
By now, few expect Bush regime representatives
to be anything but morally dishonest and intellectually shifty.
It is appropriate that the US government rejects the jurisdiction
of the International Criminal Court given the record of so many
of its functionaries. The recent rebuke by the International
Red Cross for US government treatment of the prisoners in Guantanamo
was timely and salutary.
But the United States people are not
their government. They have offered repeated examples from which
everyone can take heart. Innumerable individuals like Ita Ford,
Maureen Clarke, Dorothy Kazel, Jean Donovan and James Carney
have already helped build another America, influenced by the
United States' labor traditions, civil rights history and anti-war
movements. Millions of United States citizens actively continue
building a vision that rejects exploitation and intimidation
masquerading as "free trade" and dismisses with contempt
support for murderous military and paramilitary forces under
cover of false campaigns against drugs or terrorism.
A new generation is defending the authentic
American ideals exemplified often enough from Chicago and La
Demajagua to present day Chiapas and Bolivia. It is unlikely
that Ben Linder and Rachel Corrie will be the last United States
citizens to give their lives out of goodness for the sake of
a better world. Their enduring presence and boundless charity
renders alien and lilliputian the dysfunctional, psychotic regime
John Negroponte represents at the UN.
Toni Solo ia an activist based in Central
America. Contact :--tonisolo52@yahoo.com
NOTES
1. US terrorism against Venezuela
--'Chavez Accuses CIA as Bombings Rock
Venezuela' Agence France-Presse.Saturday 11 October 2003 (in
www.truthout.com)
--'Waiting for a response to U.S.-based
terrorists' by Dozthor Zurlent,October 13, 2003 www.yellowtimes.org
2. Ben Linder – among many
sites:
--www.rtfcam.org/martyrs/fullness_of_life/ben_linder.htm
--www.scripter.net/backpages/blinder.htm
3Carlos Manuel de Cespedes owned a sugar
plantation at La Demajagua near the town of Manzanillo in Cuba's
south east. On October 10th in 1868, he rang the sugar mill's
bell and assembled his slaves. Cespedes announced he was freeing
them, and called on them to join him in a fight to win Cuba's
independence from Spain. The bell ubsequently became a symbol
of defiance to the US-dominated Batista dictatorship.
4. For the case of the four murdered
US women religious:-
--Chapter Two of "Manufacturing
Consent" by Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky. Pantheon
Books. 1988
--Lawyers Committee for Human Rights
(www.lchr.org/lac/nuns/nuns.htm)
--"WHO IS THOMAS PICKERING?",
Democracy NOW!, July 13, 1998 (www.pacifica.org)
--United States Institute of Peace Library.
Item:--"UN Security Council, Annex, From Madness to Hope:
the 12-year war in El alvaldor: Report of the Commission on the
Truth for El Salvador, S/25500, 1993, 62-75." (www.usip.org)
5. For James Carney:-
--EN BUSQUEDA DE LA VERDAD QUE SE NOS
OCULTA. Un informe preliminar del Comisionado Nacional de los
Derechos Humanos sobre el Proceso de Desclasificacion. Dr. Leo
Valladares Lanza and Susan C. Peacock. January 1998 www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/)
--"Friends reflect on life of radical
priest who disappeared 20 years ago" Shawnee News Star February
8th 2003 (www.news-star.com)
--"EMBASSY VIGIL FOR FATHER CARNEY",
EPICA News Release. Tegucigalpa, Honduras Dec. 3, 1997 www.igc.apc.org/epica)
6 "U.S. embassy throws out Catholics
demanding truth about Carney", Paul Jeffrey. National Catholic
Reporter. November 3rd 1997
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Robert
Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James
Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher
Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane
Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin
Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn
Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey
Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets'
Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
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