Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
August 28, 2003
Tariq Ali
Occupied
Iraq Will Never Know Peace
Website of the Day
Pot TV
Recent
Stories
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?
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
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
Hot Stories
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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August
28, 2003
Shooting Ali in the
Back
Why
the Pacification is Doomed
By DAVID LINDORFF
If you want to know why the U.S. campaign to pacify
Iraq and make the country into a docile puppet state is doomed
to failure, just look at what happened to 17-year-old Ali Muhsin.
Shot and killed by American soldiers
on Tuesday, he died on his family's front stoop as neighbors
gathered around, and frightened American soldiers pointed their
guns at anyone who got too close.
According to Iraqis, including several
who worked with the boy at a tire repair shop, Ali Muhsin was
simply a kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, who, because
of the color of the shirt he was wearing, was mistaken for someone
who had just dropped two hand grenades onto a U.S. military patrol.
But even the account given in the New
York Times on Aug. 27 by American troops involved in the incident
raises serious questions about just what is going on in Iraq.
According to those troops, a U.S. soldier, Sergeant Ray Vejar,
saw something dropped from the street above as his Humvee approached
a tunnel. Vejar didn't recognize the dropped object as a grenade
until it exploded near him, but he did claim to have seen two
men overhead on the street--one dressed in white and one in green,
the latter of whom had "moved toward the railing."
Vejar says when his team raced up onto
the street after exiting the tunnel, to pursue their attackers,
they saw two figures in white and green start running. He says
the man in green stopped and turned. "He looked right at
me and I positively ID'd him as the guy who was at the railing,"
he says. Such a positive ID sounds surprising, considering that
earlier, Vejar says he couldn't even tell what was being dropped,
and surely was more focussed on what was dropping, than on the
face of whoever it was up on the street.
In any event, what happened next is particularly
troubling.
Vejar says he and another soldier chased
the fleeing man in green into an alley. But it was another group
of soldiers in a Humvee who found Ali (who of course may or may
not have been the same man Vejar was chasing).
When Ali tried to flee the Humvee, the
soldier manning that vehicle's powerful mounted machine gun fired
a warning shot, causing him to stop. As a soldier from the Humvee
approached the boy, he tried to flee again. This time, the machine
gunner shot him, hitting him several times.
Ali managed to stagger two blocks to
his family's home before collapsing on the front stoop, where
he died slowly.
It was at that point that Sgt. Vehar
arrived, pushed his way through the gathering crowd (which included
the boy's wailing mother), and identified him, saying "I
know he was at the railing."
Okay. If this account is correct (and
the boy's neighbors say it is not--claiming that in fact he had
been working at his job  when the grenade was dropped,
and had only gone out to see what the commotion was), we have
to ask what kind of rules were being followed when the soldier
in the Humvee decided to shoot an unarmed fleeing boy in the
back.
If this was rules of war, then perhaps
it could be justified. Nasty perhaps, but a fleeing combatant
can be shot in wartime. But is this a war or an occupation? In
a war, the very outcome of the conflict is in question, making
it perhaps necessary to shoot first and ask questions later.
But at the point that, as our Commander-in-Chief claims, "major
conflict is over," and the outcome of the battle has been
determined, such wild west behavior is no longer called for.
If what we have now in Iraq is an occupation,
the occupier has to be a lot more restrained and careful about
who gets terminated with extreme prejudice. An unarmed person
fleeing a military patrol cannot automatically be presumed to
be an enemy combatant. Fleeing a group of soldiers might be the
logical and understandable--even if foolish--response of many
innocent people. It is not a mistake for which anyone should
be executed. And clearly the soldiers in the Humvee, including
the one who fired the fatal shots that executed Ali, were not
the ones who claimed to recognize him. They were purely guessing
he was the one. It was only Sgt. Vehar, who was not on the scene
at the time of the shooting, who claims he could identify the
boy.
Bad enough that another young person,
combatant or not, has died in this American war of aggression.
Worse yet that it may have been an innocent lad who was shot
and killed.
But even from the point of view of American
policy makers, this incident must be viewed as indicative of
a disaster in the making.
Consider the situation in the U.S. We
have a functioning Constitution, a set of laws and courts, and
a whole bunch of legally constituted law enforcement agencies.
Yet even with all the protections that are in place, our police
all too often kill unarmed and innocent people in the heat of
action. How much worse then in a country where there are no laws,
are no courts to control the people doing the enforcing, and
where those enforcers are not people who are trained in law enforcement,
but rather are soldiers, trained in the art of killing.
Unless the Pentagon and Iraq viceroy
Paul Bremer set a clear policy instructing occupying troops that
they are not to shoot unarmed citizens--even those who are fleeing--the
inevitable slaughter of innocents will produce a groundswell
of hatred and blood vengeance within Iraq that will engulf occupying
American soldiers, and eventually lead to the defeat of any efforts
to create a new society and government in that benighted land.
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 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
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