Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
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
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
Recent
Stories
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demostration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
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
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
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
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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Chilean
Coup Memorial Edition
September 11, 2003
A
Grandiose Folly
The
Political Capital of 9/11
By ROBERT FISK
When the attacks were launched against the World
Trade Centre and the Pentagon two years ago today, who had ever
heard of Fallujah or Hillah? When the Lebanese hijacker flew
his plane into the ground in Pennsylvania, who would ever have
believed that President George Bush would be announcing a "new
front line in the war on terror" as his troops embarked
on a hopeless campaign against the guerrillas of Iraq?
Who could ever have conceived of an American
president calling the world to arms against "terrorism"
in "Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza"? Gaza? What do the
miserable, crushed, cruelly imprisoned Palestinians of Gaza have
to do with the international crimes against humanity in New York,
Washington and Pennsylvania?
Nothing, of course. Neither does Iraq
have anything to do with 11 September. Nor were there any weapons
of mass destruction in Iraq, any al-Qa'ida links with Iraq, any
45-minute timeline for the deployment of chemical weapons nor
was there any "liberation".
No, the attacks on 11 September have
nothing to do with Iraq. Neither did 11 September change the
world. President Bush cruelly manipulated the grief of the American
people--and the sympathy of the rest of the world--to introduce
a "world order" dreamed up by a clutch of fantasists
advising the Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld.
The Iraqi "regime change",
as we now know, was planned as part of a Perle-Wolfowitz campaign
document to the would-be Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu
years before Bush came to power. It beggars belief that Tony
Blair should have signed up to this nonsense without realising
that it was no more nor less than a project invented by a group
of pro-Israeli American neo-conservatives and right-wing Christian
fundamentalists.
But even now, we are fed more fantasy.
Afghanistan--its American-paid warlords raping and murdering
their enemies, its women still shrouded for the most part in
their burqas, its opium production now back as the world's number
one export market, and its people being killed at up to a hundred
a week (five American troops were shot dead two weekends ago)
is a "success", something which Messrs Bush and Rumsfeld
still boast about. Iraq--a midden of guerrilla hatred and popular
resentment--is also a "success". Yes, Bush wants $87bn
to keep Iraq running, he wants to go back to the same United
Nations he condemned as a "talking shop" last year,
he wants scores of foreign armies to go to Iraq to share the
burdens of occupation--though not, of course, the decision-making,
which must remain Washington's exclusive imperial preserve.
What's more, the world is supposed to
accept the insane notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict--the
planet's last colonial war, although all mention of the illegal
Jewish colonies in the West Bank and Gaza have been erased from
the Middle East narrative in the American press--is part of the
"war on terror", the cosmic clash of religious will
that President Bush invented after 11 September. Could Israel's
interests be better served by so infantile a gesture from Bush?
The vicious Palestinian suicide bombers
and the grotesque implantation of Jews and Jews only in the colonies
has now been set into this colossal struggle of "good"
against "evil", in which even Ariel Sharon--named as
"personally" responsible for the 1982 Sabra and Chatila
massacre by Israel's own commission of inquiry--is "a man
of peace", according to Mr Bush.
And new precedents are set without discussion.
Washington kills the leadership of its enemies with impunity:
it tries to kill Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar and does kill
Uday and Qusay Hussein and boasts of its prowess in "liquidating"
the al-Qa'ida leadership from rocket-firing "drones".
It tries to kill Saddam in Baghdad and slaughters 16 civilians
and admits that the operation was "not risk-free".
In Afghanistan, three men have now been murdered in the US interrogation
centre at Bagram. We still don't know what really goes on in
Guantanamo.
What do these precedents mean? I have
a dark suspicion. From now on, our leaders, our politicians,
our statesmen will be fair game too. If we go for the jugular,
why shouldn't they? The killing of the UN's Sergio Vieira de
Mello, was not, I think, a chance murder. Hamas's most recent
statements--and since they've been added to the Bush circus of
evil, we should take them seriously--are now, more than ever,
personally threatening Mr Sharon. Why should we expect any other
leader to be safe? If Yasser Arafat is driven into exile yet
again, will there be any restraints left?
Of course, America's enemies were a grisly
bunch. Saddam soiled his country with the mass graves of the
innocents, Mullah Omar allowed his misogynist legions to terrify
an entire society in Afghanistan. But in their absence, we have
created banditry, rape, kidnapping, guerrilla war and anarchy.
And all in the name of the dead of 11 September. The future of
the Middle East--which is what 11 September was partly about,
though we are not allowed to say so--has never looked bleaker
or more bloody. The United States and Britain are trapped in
a war of their own making, responsible for their own appalling
predicament but responsible, too, for the lives of thousands
of innocent human beings--cut to pieces by American bombs in
Afghanistan and Iraq, shot down in the streets of Iraq by trigger-happy
GIs.
As for "terror", our enemies
are closing in on our armies in Iraq and our supposed allies
in Baghdad and Afghanistan--even in Pakistan. We have done all
this in the name of the dead of 11 September. Not since the Second
World War have we seen folly on this scale. And it has scarcely
begun.
Robert Fisk is
a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to Cockburn and
St. Clair's forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 1 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
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