Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 5, 2003
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Recent
Stories
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
August 28, 2003
Gilad Atzmon
The
Most Common Mistakes of Israelis
David Vest
Moore's
Monument: Cement Shoes for the Constitution
David Lindorff
Shooting Ali in the Back: Why the Pacification is Doomed
Chris Floyd
Cheap Thrills: Bush Lies to Push His War
Wayne Madsen
Restoring the Good, Old Term "Bum"
Elaine Cassel
Not Clueless in Chicago
Stan Goff
Nukes in the Dark
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Behold, My Package
Website of the Day
Palestinian
Artists
August 27, 2003
Bruce Jackson
Little
Deaths: Hiding the Body Count in Iraq
John Feffer
Nuances and North Korea: Six Countries in Search of a Solution
Dave Riley
an Interview with Tariq Ali on the Iraq War
Lacey Phillabaum
Bush's Holy War in the Forests
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Website of the Day
The Dean Deception
August 26, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing the Dead
David Lindorff
The
Great Oil Gouge: Burning Up that Tax Rebate
Sarmad S. Ali
Baghdad is Deadlier Than Ever: the View of an Iraqi Coroner
Christopher Brauchli
Bush Administration Equates Medical Pot Smokers with Segregationists
Juliana Fredman
Collective Punishment on the West Bank: Dialysis, Checkpoints
and a Palestinian Madonna
Larry Siems
Ghosts of Regime Changes Past in Guatemala
Elaine Cassel
Onward, Ashcroft Soldiers!
Saul Landau
Bush:
a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action Figure?
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
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
5, 2003
Courage and the Democrats
Facing
the Music
By DAVE LINDORFF
On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the White
House and Pentagon made much of their new war strategy of "Shock
and Awe," saying that it was intended to focus tremendous
firepower on a select few targets of the Baathist power strucure
and military leadership, shocking and awing the country, while
doing little damage to the larger society and population. As
described, the strategy was to be a sort of "neutron bomb"
that would selectively destroy the key ruling elite while leaving
Iraq's people, society and infrastructure largely intact.
In fact, the reverse has happened.
The bombs and assaults of the so-called
"Shock and Awe" campaign did little damage to the Iraqi
power structure which largely melted away into hiding, and the
army simply evaporated, with most soldiers just doffing their
khaki's and walking away from battle in their civvies. What clearly
was effectively destroyed by the U.S. military campaign, and
its inept aftermath, was most of the country's essential infrastructure
of power, communications, water and sewers, its economy, its
schools, its healthcare system. If "Shock and Awe"
was envisioned as a kind of "neutron bomb" the reality
has been more of a classic nuke.
The astonishing thing is how little the
American public seems to care about this incredible and unprecedented
disaster.
When former Philadelphia Mayor Wilson
Goode and his police decided to flush out a group of back-to-nature
communalists in West Philadelphia, known as MOVE, they opted
for a satchel bomb dropped by helicopter onto the roof of the
MOVE house. The plan, supposedly, was to slowly burn down the
building and drive the holed-up MOVE people out into the waiting
arms of police. The reality was an out-of-control conflagration
that killed 11 people, inclulding five children, in the house,
and  burned down several residential
blocks and 60 houses. When that happened, whatever Philadelphians
thought of the controversial group MOVE, it spelled the end not
only of Goode's political career, but also of the free reign
Philadelphia police had enjoyed since the days of Mayor Frank
Rizzo.
Similarly, on a national scale, when
President Lyndon Johnson lied to the American public about a
fraudulent attack by North Vietnamese speed boats on an American
destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, and then sent half a million
troops to Vietnam claiming that he would bring an end to that
conflict, only to have it turn into a bloody disaster, he was
driven from the White House.
Idiodic or dishonest behavior, leading
to public policy disasters, has led to public dismay and punishment
at the ballot box in the past. Indeed, it has done exactly that
in California, where Gov. Gray Davis' inept handling of the state's
Enron-induced energy crisis, and his inability to contain the
state's balooning budget deficit, has led to a recall campaign
that could bounce him from office next month.
Oddly, however, we have an unelected
president in Washington who has, on multiple fronts, made the
ultimate hash of domestic and foreign policy, and yet he is still
considered to be likely to win re-election next year.
Consider:
Bush led this nation into a bloody and
costly war of aggression based upon blatant lies, self-deception
and ignorance, a war that America cannot win, and that the country
now cannot easily walk away from. This war has killed thousands
of innocent Iraqi civilians and hundreds of Gis, will cost hundreds
of billions of dollars, is tying up the entire U.S. military,
and has, like Vietnam before it, demonstrated not the might but
the impotence of American military power.
He has put the government and the economy
on a path to bankruptcy so serious that even the International
Monetary Fund, normally a docile handmaiden of U.S. hegemony,
has criticized as irresponsible and unsustainable.
He has abrogated a host of treaties which,
painstakingly negotiated over decades, had been leading, albeit
stumblingly, to a safer, more humane world.
He has launched an unprecedented assault
on the environment, undermining global efforts to confront the
threat of global warming, opening up remaining U.S. old growth
forests to commercial exploitation, and gutting clean air and
clean water regulations.
All this and still, if polls are to be
believed, the general public response remains largely a collective
yawn.
Part of the problem is the media, which
has grown far more concentrated, and far less combative over
the last decade or so. Aaron Brown, for example, on CNN, can
do a story on Iraq, and then casually segue into a piece on the
World Trade Center Towers by musing, "everything seems to
be linked to 9/11 these days," thus buying into the White
House disinformation campaign that the war against Iraq is part
of the administration's War on Terror, despite no evidence linking
Iraq with Al Qaeda or any international terrorist activities.
Likewise, The New York Times can report on the Bush adminstration's
desperate efforts to enlist the U.N. in the Iraq occupation without
clearly explaining that that same administration had earlier
not only ignored the U.N.'s rejection of a war resolution, but
had openly and blatantly lied to Security Council members about
Iraq's war capabilities and alleged links to terrorism.
Part of the problem too is cowardice
on the part of the ostensible political opposition party. Leading
Democratic candidates--meaning those candidates whom the above-mentioned
complicit corporate media have in their wisdom designated as
leading candidates worthy of routine coverage--have refused to
seriously challenge the policies of the Bush administration.
Howard Dean, the ostensible front runner, while opposing the
war and the government's enormous tax cuts, has said he supports
the continued occupation and even the "preventative war"
strategy that was used to initiate the conflict in the first
place. Sen. John Kerry, billed as Dean's main opponent, actually
voted for the president's authority to go to war, and now pretends
he was deceived, though plenty of his colleagues, including Sen.
Robert Byrd and presidential candidate Rep. Dennis Kucinich were
well aware of the lies as they were being spoken. Neither Dean
nor Kerry are offering much beyond warmed over Republican economics
in their domestic policies. Indeed, as columnist Matt Miller
observes, so tame are today's Democrats that they would probably
consider Richard Nixon's 1970s environmental, health and welfare
proposals too radical.
In fact, some of the Democratic candidates,
notably Kucinich, but also Carol Moseley-Braun and Al Sharpton,
are taking real aim at the Bush adminstration's follies, foibles
and falsehoods, and in Kucinich's case, are proposing a set of
real, progressive alternatives. The corporate media, however,
ignore them, casting them as minor candidates, though by all
accounts Kucinich is drawing large, enthusiastic crowds on the
stump in Iowa and New Hampshire, and though, at joint appearances
of all the candidates, it is often Sharpton who wins some of
the biggest rounds of applause.
Still, President Bush for the most part
continues to get a free ride, from both the media and the public.
Things may yet turn around. As the situation
in Iraq continues to deteriorate, and as the growing U.S. deficit
continues to drive interest rates higher and the economy and
stock market south, the public is bound, at some point, to start
thinking for itself instead of listening to the coiffed and complicit
talking heads of network "news" programs.
At that point, Bush will have to face
the same music as President Johnson and Philadelphia Mayor Wilson
Goode.
The question is, will that moment come
in time for the November '04 elections.
A dose of courage among the "major"
Democratic candidates for national office could speed things
along.
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 August 30 / Sept. 1, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
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