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Today's Stories

October 7, 2003

Gary Leupp
Israel's Attack on Syria: Who's on the Wrong Side of History, Now?

 

October 6, 2003

Robert Fisk
US Gave Israel Green Light for Raid on Syria

Forrest Hylton
Upheaval in Bolivia: Crisis and Opportunity

Benjamin Dangl
Divisions Deepen in Third Week of Bolivia's Gas War

Bridget Gibson
Oh, Pioneers!: Bush's New Deal

Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman
The Bush-Rove-Schwarzenegger Nazi Nexus

Nicole Gamble
Rios Montt's Campaign Threatens Genocide Trials

JoAnn Wypijewski
The New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor

Website of the Day
Guerrilla Funk

 

October 3 / 5, 2003

Tim Wise
The Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment

Peter Linebaugh
Rhymsters and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW

Gary Leupp
Occupation as Rape-Marriage

Bruce Jackson
Addio Alle Armi

David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?

Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's War on Whistleblowers

Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean

Mickey Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest

Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq

John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus

William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac

Glen T. Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism

Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos

Wayne Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can

M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier

William Benzon
Scorsese's Blues

Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest

Poets' Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie

 

October 2, 2003

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
What's So Great About Gandhi, Anyway?

Amy Goodman / Jeremy Scahill
The Ashcroft-Rove Connection

Doug Giebel
Kiss and Smear: Novak and the Valerie Plame Affair

Hamid Dabashi
The Moment of Myth: Edward Said (1935-2003)

Elaine Cassel
Chicago Condemns Patriot Act

Saul Landau
Who Got Us Into This Mess?

Website of the Day
Last Day to Save Beit Arabiya!


October 1, 2003

Joanne Mariner
Married with Children: the Supremes and Gay Families

Robert Fisk
Oil, War and Panic

Ron Jacobs
Xenophobia as State Policy

Elaine Cassel
The Lamo Case: Secret Subpoenas and the Patriot Act

Shyam Oberoi
Shooting a Tiger

Toni Solo
Plan Condor, the Sequel?

Sean Donahue
Wesley Clark and the "No Fly" List

Website of the Day
Downloader Legal Defense Fund

 

September 30, 2003

After Dark
Arnold's 1977 Photo Shoot

Dave Lindorff
The Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well

Tom Crumpacker
The Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers

Robert Fisk
A Lesson in Obfuscation

Charles Sullivan
A Message to Conservatives

Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective

Naeem Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth

Amy Goodman / Jeremy Scahill
Does a Felon Rove the White House?

Website of the Day
The Edward Said Page


September 29, 2003

Robert Fisk
The Myths of Western Intelligence Agencies

Iain A. Boal
Turn It Up: Pardon Mzwakhe Mbuli!

Lee Sustar
Paul Krugman: the Last Liberal?

Wayne Madsen
General Envy? Think Shinseki, Not Clark

Benjamin Dangl
Bolivia's Gas War

Uri Avnery
The Magnificent 27

Pledge Drive of the Day
Antiwar.com

 

September 26 / 28, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Alan Dershowitz, Plagiarist

David Price
Teaching Suspicions

Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity

Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the Patriot Act

Brian Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again

Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama

Robert Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions

M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA

John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN

Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada

William S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security

Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia

Chris Floyd
Vanishing Act

Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui

Richard Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved

George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said

Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized

Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss

Mickey Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice

Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said

Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room

Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie

Website of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?

 

September 25, 2003

Edward Said
Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony

Robert Fisk
Fanning the Flames of Hatred

Sarah Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School

David Krieger
The Second Nuclear Age

Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak

Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime

Michael S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs

Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley

Mustafa Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights

Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate Heart

Website of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine


The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!


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

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?

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

Click Here for More Stories.

 

 

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October 7, 2003

Coronado in Iraq

Laughter in the Dark

By DAVID LINDORFF

The Bush administration's fiasco in Iraq is now reaching the point where, if it weren't for the thousands of dead and maimed Iraqi's and Americans, if it weren't for the hundreds of thousands of American miilitary families whose lives have been turned upside down, if it weren't for the millions of Iraqi's living under the gun, if it weren't for the millions of Americans paying through the nose for it, this would be the stuff of comedy.

Take David Kay, the ernest leader of the massive 1400-member Iraq Survey Group. Like a modern-day Coronado searching the American southwest for his fabled lost city of gold, Kay, after scouring the Iraqi countryside unimpeded for three months and blowing a reported $300 million in a vain search for those elusive Weapons of Mass Destruction, returns to Washington empty-handed, with a report saying that he can't find anything.

What does the administration then do? It asks for more time--three times more--and more money--twice as much again--to keep looking.

CNN, meanwhile, invites Kay's biggest cheerleader in the media, N.Y Times reporter Judith Miller, on to the Aaron Brown News Hour to comment on Kay's report, without mentioning to viewers that she herself has a book out all about those dangerous WMDs--a book whose sales and reputation will wither away if Kay turns up nothing. Miller predictably, suggests that what Kay has provided is merely a "snapshot in time" (never mind that the exposure time for the snapshot was three months). If we keep looking, she suggests with a bright smile, though on the basis of no evidence, we'll find those elusive weaons.

As for the attacks on American troops, which are growing more frequent,more lethal and more professional as each week goes by, the Pentagon, in a marvelously clever maneuver, offers up the theory that this is because the American military's attacks are succeeding. "The resistance forces are getting whittled down to the leadership, the professional military people who have been organizing the attacks, who are now having to go out on their own," they say--again with no evidence to support this idea. Never mind that this rationale flies in the face of countless reports from Iraq suggesting the opposite--that the ranks of the resistance guerrilla movement are swelling as the occupation goes on.

Bush himself goes to the U.N. to beg for military and financial help cleaning up his mess in Iraq, but because he's afraid to look weak at home, he offers no apologies for his abuse of the international institution or of the Security Council members that had sagely opposed America's war adventure last spring. Meanwhile, by his very appeal to the U.N., an institution reviled by American conservatives, he is viewed as a spineless wimp by those very Americans he wanted to impress with his toughness.

Even the president's vaunted staged aircraft carrier victory landing last May, which was once supposed to be the centerpiece of the ad campaign in his re-election bid-- is now the butt of jokes by Democrats, who are at this point feeling comfortable enough about the Bush Admistration's weakness to joke about the president's fondness for playing "dress up."

Karl Rove, once the dreaded force behind the throne, the bane of a Democratic resurgence, is now the subject of a felony investigation for the outing of an undercover CIA agent and is at risk of being led out of the White House in cuffs and leg irons, unless he can manage to get some underling to take the fall for him.

As for Iraq's oil, which the Bush warmongers long promised would be up and flowing after the war and able to finance the country's reconstruction, is still just trickling out of the country, at perhaps a fourth of pre-war export volume. It turns out American military planners--while investing enormous military assets in protecting the refineries and oil fields from the earliest days of the invasion, forgot about the ease with which pipelines can be sabatoged. So now the Administration, which has already run the U.S. budget off a cliff with a mind-boggling $500-billion deficit, has been forced to ask Congress for another $87 billion for Iraq--a staggering figure that everyone knows is just a fraction of what will actually be needed.

If we as an American electorate had partied all night on election eve in November 2000, and then gone out the next day and deliberately tried to vote in a collection of clowns and no-nothings in a perverse effort to see how badly they could screw up the country in just four years, we couldn't have come up with an Administration more inept and bungling than this one.

Is anyone laughing?

I don't hear anyone laughing.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. A collection of Lindorff's stories can be found here: http://www.nwuphilly.org/dave.html

Weekend Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003

Tim Wise
The Other Race Card: Rush and the Politics of White Resentment

Peter Linebaugh
Rhymsters and Revolutionaries: Joe Hill and the IWW

Gary Leupp
Occupation as Rape-Marriage

Bruce Jackson
Addio Alle Armi

David Krieger
A Nuclear 9/11?

Ray McGovern
L'Affaire Wilsons: Wives are Now "Fair Game" in Bush's War on Whistleblowers

Col. Dan Smith
Why Saddam Didn't Come Clean

Mickey Z.
In Our Own Image: Teaching Iraq How to Deal with Protest

Roger Burbach
Bush Ideologues v. Big Oil in Iraq

John Chuckman
Wesley Clark is Not Cincinnatus

William S. Lind
Versailles on the Potomac

Glen T. Martin
The Corruptions of Patriotism

Anat Yisraeli
Bereavement as Israeli Ethos

Wayne Madsen
Can the Republicans Get Much Worse? Sure, They Can

M. Junaid Alam
The Racism Barrier

William Benzon
Scorsese's Blues

Adam Engel
The Great American Writing Contest

Poets' Basement
McNeill, Albert, Guthrie

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