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Today's
Stories
September
30, 2003
Amy Goodman
/ Jeremy Scahill
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
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
Recent
Stories
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
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?
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
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
30, 2003
What Are They Hiding?
Does
a Felon Rove the White House?
By AMY GOODMAN and
JEREMY SCAHILL
(and the Staff of Democracy Now!)
Allegations are swirling that Karl Rove, senior
political adviser to President George W. Bush, may have committed
a felony by blowing the cover of a CIA operative. CIA Director
George Tenet has called on the Justice Department to investigate
but the White House said Monday that "President George W.
Bush has no plans to ask his staff members whether they played
a role." And what makes this story even more remarkable
is how seriously the Bush family has viewed outing intelligence
operatives in the past.
The man at the center of this firestorm
is Joseph Wilson, the retired U.S. diplomat who debunked the
White House's key evidence that Saddam Hussein was rebuilding
his nuclear program.
Two weeks ago Democracy Now! aired Wilson's
comments before a suburban Seattle audience that he believes
Bush's closest aide, Karl Rove, told reporters that Wilson's
wife was a CIA agent.
At the forum Wilson declared, "At
the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether
or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of White House in
handcuffs." Wilson added, "And trust me when I use
that name, I measure my words."
Wilson told Democracy Now!, "I have
reason to believe that it was the political office that at a
minimum confirmed it and the political office was Karl RoveIt
was a reporter who told me it was Karl Rove and that's as far
as I want to go right now."
The whole scandal began in July a week
after Wilson went public in an op-ed piece in the New York Times
saying he was the diplomat sent by the Bush Administration to
Niger to investigate whether Saddam Hussein tried to buy uranium
from the African country. His findings: the accusations were
baseless.
Wilson was not alone. The US ambassador
to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, knew of the allegations of
uranium sales to Iraq and had already debunked them in her reports
back to Washington. Wilson's conclusions also coincided with
those of Deputy Commander-in-Chief of the US Armed Forces four-star
Marine Corps General, Carlton Fulford, who had also researched
the matter on the ground in Niger. Wilson felt he had authoritatively
debunked the Niger rumor and "the matter was settled."
But the lie refused to die. In January
2003, Bush made his famous 16 word line in his State of the Union
address: "The British government has learned that Saddam
Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from
Africa."
In July, soon after Wilson blew the whistle
in The New York Times, the White House was forced to admit that
the accusation should not have been included in the State of
the Union.
A few days later, conservative columnist
Robert Novak wrote a column in which he cited "two senior
administration officials" and stated that Wilson's wife,
Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative dealing with weapons of mass
destruction.
In an extensive interview on Democracy
Now!, Wilson said that the outing of his wife as an alleged CIA
operative and other attempts to discredit him "are clearly
intended to intimidate others from coming forward."
But it's not just intimidation; it's
a felony. Until now, a crime the Bush family has taken very seriously.
According to Ray McGovern, a retired CIA analyst who worked under
Bush Sr. at both the CIA and the White House, "The Intelligence
Identities Protection Act was made draconian, it was made very,
very specific, automatic penalties that would accrue to both
officials and non-officials-anyone who knowingly disclosed the
identity of a CIA agent or officer." The penalty: fines
of up to $50,000 and imprisonment of up to 10 years.
Many believe the law was passed in direct
response to former CIA agent Philip Agee's blowing the whistle
on CIA dirty tricks in his book Inside the Company. George H.W.
Bush, who was vice-president when the law was passed, said some
of the criticism of the Agency ruined secret U.S. clandestine
operations in foreign countries.
So seriously did the Bushes take the
crime of exposing CIA operatives that Barbara Bush, in her memoirs,
accused Agee of blowing the cover of the CIA Station Chief in
Greece, Richard Welch, who was assassinated outside his Athens
residence in 1975. Agee sued the former first lady and Mrs. Bush
withdrew the statement from additional printings of her book.
Still, at a celebration marking the fiftieth anniversary of the
CIA, the elder Bush again singled out Agee in his remarks, calling
him "a traitor to our country."
David MacMichael worked as a CIA analyst
at the time the law was passed. He told Democracy Now!: "If
former President Bush could define Philip Agee as a traitor for
exposing the identities of serving intelligence officers, if
his son's political advisor has done the sameit is a very serious
felony under the current Act."
(If in fact it was Karl Rove who leaked
or authorized the leak to Novak, it won't be the first time the
two have worked in tandem. According to Esquire, in 1992, Rove
was fired from the Bush Sr. presidential campaign for leaking
a negative story. The difference is, whoever authorized this
leak, committed a felony.)
Rather than investigating who in the
administration committed this alleged felony, the White House
spent months dodging reporters' questions. "I'm telling
you flatly, that is not the way this White House operatesNo one
was certainly given any authority to do anything of that nature,"
declared White House spokesperson Scott McClellan, careful legalistic
language. Neither Bush nor Ashcroft has publicly called for an
investigation.
And Vice President Dick Cheney's only
public comments on Joe Wilson have been when questioned on NBC's
"Meet the Press" on Sept. 14, "I don't know Joe
Wilson. I've never met Joe Wilson" and "I have no idea
who hired him."
Cheney's comments strain credulity.
While technically he may have never met
Wilson, the investigation into Niger was done at the request
of the vice president's office. Surely, Mr. Cheney learned of
this, if not before the request was made, then after, when, as
the Washington Post revealed, Cheney traveled repeatedly to the
CIA during 2002.
"This is not unusual. This is unprecedented,"
retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern told Democracy Now! "The
Vice President of the United States never during [my] 27 years
came out to the CIA headquarters for a working visit. this is
like inviting money-changers into the temple."
While Cheney may not know Wilson, there
is little doubt he knows of him. When Cheney was helping run
the Persian Gulf War, as secretary of defense, Wilson was one
of the key players. As the acting US ambassador on the ground
in Baghdad in the weeks leading up to the war, the White House
consulted Wilson daily. In those weeks, he was the only open
line of communication between Washington and Saddam Hussein.
Cheney was the Secretary of Defense at the time and a key player
in the day-to-day operations and intelligence gathering. Furthermore,
Wilson was formally commended by the Bush administration for
his bravery and heroism in the weeks leading up to the war. In
that time, Wilson helped evacuate thousands of foreigners from
Kuwait, negotiated the release of more than 120 American hostages
and sheltered nearly 800 Americans in the embassy compound.
"Your courageous leadership during
this period of great danger for American interests and American
citizens has my admiration and respect. I salute, too, your skillful
conduct of our tense dealings with the government of Iraq,"
President Bush wrote Wilson in a letter. "The courage and
tenacity you have exhibited throughout this ordeal prove that
you are the right person for the job."
Wilson says that he heard from people
who were at meetings chaired by Bush in the lead up to the Gulf
War, "When people would come up with an idea, George Bush
would often lean forward and ask them, 'What does Joe Wilson
say about that? What does Joe Wilson think about that?' So at
the highest level of our government there was keen interest in
knowing what the field was saying and Dick Cheney was probably
at those meetings."
What's Cheney hiding? What's the White
House hiding?
There is a scandal brewing at 1600 Pennsylvania
Avenue that if treated properly by the Department of Justice
and elected officials could prove to be one of the clearest cases
of documentable criminal conduct and blatant lies by an administration
since Watergate and the Iran-Contra scandal.
Democracy Now! is a daily national grassroots
radio/tv newshour. Research assistance for this article was provided
by producers Mike Burke and Sharif Abdel Kouddous. www.democracynow.org.
They can be reached at: jeremy@democracynow.o
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 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?
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