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November 7, 2003
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
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
Hot Stories
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
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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November
8, 2003
America's Far-Moving
Rightwing
The
Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
By NORMAN MADARASZ
Prior to the attempt made on Paul Wolfowitz's
life in Baghdad on October 26, the deputy secretary of defense
had already sat far more in the limelight than any of his predecessors.
From Vanity Fair to PBS's Charlie Rose, including
a passing reference in Nobel Prize novelist Saul Bellow's Ravelstein,
Wolfowitz has proved his media savvies. Yet caught up in
Bush's refrains of how the "world is becoming a safer place",
repeated by America's corporate press elite with THE contempt
akin to a herd's, few English-speaking readers will have noticed
that Paul Wolfowitz was chosen on Rosh Hashanah (October 1) by
the Jerusalem Post as Man of the (Jewish) Year.
With his associates in the Bush administration
and media circle, Wolfowitz belongs to the 'neoconservative'
camp. On the field, he is one of a group of policy hawks who
have undermined internationalist diplomacy to serve the unilateral
ends of the United States through war, covert action and nationalist/militarist
propaganda. The neocons hold the key power positions in the Bush
administration. When they don't, as at the State department,
they call the shots of what goes on from within the operational
offices. Few if any of them have on-the-field military experience.
As Rhett Butler would have said, they are the "stay-at-home
speakers filling the ears too full with fine words of those who
have to fight."
The occupation of Iraq is, unfortunately,
providing many of them with their basic military training. The
administrator for Iraq, Paul Bremer, may have emerged from Kissinger's
civilian foreign analyst camp; he remains a neoconservative by
proxy. As also does, notwithstanding political appearances, the
candidate for the Democratic Party, retired General Wesley Clark.
In its array of public figures, the neoconservative pedigree
proudly represents America's white heterosexual male elite. Yet
their devotion to belligerence has garnered them the appellation
of the War Party. As Bret Stephens from the Jerusalem Post
wrote in celebration of their man of the year: "On
September 15, 2001, at a meeting in Camp David, [it was Wolfowitz
who] advised President George W. Bush to skip Kabul and train
American guns on Baghdad."
THROUGH A LOOKING
GLASS
The neoconservative foreign policy agenda
has by now been reported enough for most world citizens to understand
its major aims and alliances. In the neoconservative press, it
is especially easy to testify to the group's frank commitment
to Israel's most rightwing expansionist vision. Long before 9/11,
magazines such as the National Review, the Weekly Standard,
or newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and the
Canadian dailies of the Asper chain, were all marching in step
to stir up misrepresentation of Arabs. Typically, the information
manufacturers seek to demean the nature of a people by roughshod
identification with their governments' agendas.
Through a forced equation linking democracy
with human goodness, the only worthy country in the Middle East
would be Israel. For those who still remain incredulous about
an infiltration of the American government by Israel's Likud
party, it is easy to blog on to how Richard Perle, the Pentagon
strongman and former head of the commercial propaganda war machine
known as the Defense Advisory Board, worked on policy analysis
for Benjamin Netanyahu's presidential campaign. It is even easier
to thumb through the pages of Daniel Pipes' book on "Islamism".
Then, turn to the pages of the Jerusalem Post, and notice
how both Pipes and Perle are among its closest associates.
Brett Stephen's article is instructive
as well for celebrating the "transformative" nature
of the foreign policy planning of the current American government.
Transformative, that is, of the broader Middle East. As the reader
scrolls, it grows very clear how the present concern of the Sharon
cabinet is not so much the border and state conflict within the
occupied territories it deems its own-to the condemnation of
the international community and international law. As Stephens
confirms, "Israel has long waited for an administration
that understands that the principal problem in the Middle East
is not the unsettled status of our borders." Instead, the
Israeli government is focusing on "the unsettling nature
of Arab regimes - and of the bellicosity, fanaticism, and resentments
to which they give rise." Getting the US administration
to act on that concern has been one of the leading policy tasks
of the neoconservative camp.
Nothing in American law prevents close
media and political ties with another State, provided it not
be communist. Nor is there anything in American political science
banning inference based on observation regarding the geopolitical
stakes that may neatly lie tucked away behind international connections.
The ties that bind the US and Israel are obviously not recent
ones. Moreover, neocons, such as Dick Cheney, his chief of staff
"Scooter" Libby and Donald Rumsfeld have all embraced
Arab tyrants in older days when the enemy was communism. Although
those winds may have changed, bureaucratic commitment to Israel's
most fanatical leaders has gone unchanged.
Never has it been as striking as it has
now how-at least on the lands of the Middle East and the battleground
of North American media-the American government is playing out
Israel's game. Once again: no problems to point out in principle.
Just that this alliance is being done largely at the expense
of world peace and the dignity and patience of the Arab people,
to say nothing of the lives of Palestinians who live in a kind
of daily horror few of us can fathom.
Some of the milestones of the US/Israeli
alliance are replete with nostalgia. Others, such as the bombing
of USS Liberty in 1967, fester under cover-ups. Many of the neocons
have sung the ditching of the Oslo peace accords in a waltz led
by Sharon. In the backrooms, Cheney and his clan have reportedly
felt the need to block any attempt by Bush to meet with Chairman
Arafat, as if Bush's Christian fundamentalist credentials were
more fragile, more on the "Venus" side of the neo-cons'
"Mars" rational cynicism.
In Bush's eyes, the world may well appear
to be a less dangerous place, but only when put into contrast
with the law of the jungle dictating the inner operations of
the neocons' world. One might like to question CIA head George
Tenet, hardly the dove he is portrayed to be by his neocon foes
in this doublespeak world, after the public castration he was
made to bear for failing to provide credible information proving
Iraq's threat. Recall the irony: behind all the 'son trying to
correct harm done to the father' stories, here son stealthily
slides a knife into the agency's back that his father once ran.
One of the jobs the neocons set out to execute, well documented
for that matter in a New Yorker report by Seymour Hersch
on May 5 2003, was to establish a more powerful intelligence
agency from within the Pentagon itself. The task of setting up
the Office of Special Plans, a parallel and counter CIA, was
overseen by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Their job: built the tale
of Weapons of Mass Destruction, and propel their "man",
Ahmed Chalabi, of the Iraqi National Congress, into power in
Iraq.
On a broader level, the neoconservative
contribution can be succinctly put in the following terms. Maintain
the power of the American economy by securing the future of its
wealthiest components: oil and weapons manufacturers. Do this
by drawing up a new enemy. Attack any form of resistance by brandishing
it as terrorist. Step by step, the neocons have taken apart the
modern democratic world from within the US structure itself.
To the public at home, they present foreign dictatorships as
corrupt and evil, but only after having partaken in bending the
Middle East to their advantage. Now they have sent in American
troops to clean up the mess made by their mentors. It often seems
that the democratic world has twisted back into clan or even
family warfare, with University of Chicago PhDs providing the
mental fodder.
The explicit tie between American foreign
policy and Israel/Likud interests will surely not dissuade the
gun-ho salivating posse who frame any criticism of Israel into
latent or tacit anti-Semitism. "In this year when anti-Semitism
is once again a fact of life, the name 'Wolfowitz' has become
its lightning rod," is the most convincing line Brett Stephens
could muster in an attempt to fend off criticism against Sharon.
It remains that the terms of the Jerusalem Post award
and what it confirms about neocon/Likud machinations must be
subjected to the minutest scrutiny. For as Ran Hacohen recently
wrote, "People abusing the taboo [of anti-Semitism] in order
to support Israel's racist and genocidal policy towards the Palestinians
do nothing less than desecrate the memory of those Jewish victims,
whose death, from a humanistic perspective, is meaningful only
inasmuch as it serves as an eternal warning to the human kind
against all kinds of discrimination, racism, and genocide."
RATIONALIZING THE
REAL
Ultimately, the Post article does
nothing less that place the policy doctrines of the American
Enterprise Institute, the neoconservatives' think tank, into
layman's words. The AEI has been providing the clearest policy
initiatives for the Bush administration, and was doing so well
before the Clinton years. Some of their stripes are familiar:
a capacity to fight on two different fronts; transforming the
nuclear arsenal into conventional war use; the brandishing of
rogue states in a move to define a new united enemy, protecting
"free" markets, etc. On the domestic front, one stumbles
against the clear advantage given to the country's military industrial
and oil elite, from Columbine to the Alaskan tar sands.
What the Post homage adds
is Israel's specific take on the issue, that is, Likud's take-issues
most often downplayed back home in the US, and veiled under spurious
accusations of anti-Semitism. Strutting out of the piece into
four dimensions is how the Hebrew State is not merely one among
many players in the region. Stephens' elegy confirms all suspicions
that Israel, far from being the US's main ally, is the main player
in and through which American foreign policy has been crafted.
It is dubious whether the term "alliance" is appropriate
to describe this tandem, the vector of which leaves from Tel
Aviv, heads on to Washington prior to returning in computerized
metal explosive form to Baghdad, Damascus, and who knows, Riyadh.
It is no longer a rhetorical question
to bewildering ask what other response Israelis could have imagined
to Sharon's state-sponsored terror strikes but the fiercest wave
of equally terrorist suicide bombings in the conflict's history?
The grave of Yitzhak Rabin has been desecrated over and over
since his assassination by the Israeli far-right eight years
ago.
For many outside the US, refutations of the neoconservative conception
of democracy are building momentum. Yet no one should be overly
optimistic. Having already assumed power through a long thought-out
process of filling the Supreme Court with rightwing conservative
fanatics, the very same court that overruled the Florida vote
recount and, de facto, named Bush president, the
unfolding of the 2004 elections remains highly preoccupying.
In the next step of a plan that seems to have no end, a further
neoconservative bureaucrat was named as Middle East advisor to
Vice-President Dick Cheney on October 21.
Said to be a long-time protégé
of Richard Perle, and a signatory of the various American Enterprise
Institute/Project for a New American Century policy drafts, David
Wurmser is also known to have called for a joint US-Israeli attack
of Damascus. Perle, who has called Syria "a terroristic
(sic) organization," was himself reported to have been in
Jerusalem recently to receive an award from the "Jerusalem
Summit," an international group of right-wing Jews and Christian
Zionists who describe themselves as defenders of "civilization"
against "Islamic fundamentalism". Wurmser's appointment
has all the looks of increased planning toward implementing the
next step in Bush's wars, especially now that his administration
will have no choice but to declare extraordinary circumstances
in order for him to be re-elected in 2004.
To be sure, no one should consider that
Wurmser's marriage to an Israeli policy analyst at the rightwing
Hudson Foundation should stir up concerns. After all, it was
no less of a credible agency than the US Department of Defense
and General Accounting Office that, in April 1996, had issued
cases of Israeli espionage within the US as well as illegal technology
retransferring. This was at a time when the neocons were not
in the executive. So, focusing on the man himself should be enough,
for Wurmser is reported to have argued against the US's policy
to form alliances with secular-nationalist Arab republics in
a bid to fight against terrorism. Just as with the American Enterprise
documents, there is little if anything in the papers he has co-signed
that indicates vision and constructive partnerships with the
diverse players currently residing in the region, let alone with
nationalist democrats there.
What stands out in his position is how
powerful a tool policy rationalism can be to dilute extremist
hatred of things Arab and Muslim. The exception lies when the
latter involves non-Arabs and non-Persians, like Turkey and Pakistan
especially, two fine flowers from which the neocons love to breathe
the scent of democracy. While media back home has put the spotlight
on resistance to Turkish 'assistance' in Iraq as coming from
the Kurds, not one outlet considered it useful to mention that
few Iraqi want to see the return of the Turkish army that dominated
their lands for centuries.
With the mounting criticism of the hyper-bellicose
actions of two otherwise respected world democracies, the neocons
are playing the anti-Semitism card with scant remorse. It can
be felt as far as in Brazil, in which there is little if any
religious or ethnic tension to speak of. In a special report
written for the October 26 Folha de Sao Paulo, Nelson
Ascher insisted that European condemnation of Sharon's far-right
Zionism is nothing but old-school anti-Semitism in metrosexual
new dress. Ascher's job was to stifle any referral to European
anger toward Israel as possibly, just possibly, resulting from
the demolition of the Palestinian Authority infrastructure. After
all, it had largely been funded with European tax payers' money.
Nor did Ascher see it fit to refer to the Arab-phobia spreading
throughout Europe. This hysteria is far more out of control than
any anti-Semitism he terms as "courageously denounced"
by new breed State-strong conservative liberal intellectuals,
like Bernard Henry Levy and Alan Finkielkraut. These writers,
among others, have never hidden their contempt for all 'extremism',
save for Israel and America's both apriori cleansed
of such human, all too human folly.
Amidst a degree of unheralded violence
which threatened to lead to a dictatorship in West Germany in
the course of the 1970s, several of that country's internationally-acclaimed
cinematographers took to making a collective documentary, Deutschland
im Herbst (Germany in Autumn). The President of Mercedes
Benz, Hanss Martin Schleyer had just been executed in a mock
popular tribunal, and the leaders of the Red Army Faction were
claimed that have committed suicide while under detention at
Stammheim maximum security penitentiary. The film opened on these
words: "When violence exceeds all sense, it no longer matters
who started; the task is only to stop." The world impatiently
awaits such a film from Israeli and Palestinian artists alike.
Norman Madarasz
is Canadian and a philosopher. He writes from Rio de Janeiro,
welcoming comments at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca.
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce
Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler
/ Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets'
Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
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