Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 12, 2003
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
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
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
Recent
Stories
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
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.
|
September
12, 2003
Exploiting
the Dead
The
First Two Years of Insanity
By JOHN CHUCKMAN
The press recently ran stories about Americans
reliving the horrors of 9/11 through released emergency-call
transcripts that include the last gasps of doomed souls. Am I
the only one struck by the extremely odd nature of this story?
Why would people expose themselves to
material that might well be regarded as pornographic when used
for anything other than an official investigation?
The normal human brain works to soften
or blot out memories of intensely disturbing events, otherwise
no one could function in times of crisis, and no one could survive
imprisonment or torture. You grieve for a while, and then you
go on with the often hard business of living. Occasionally, you
grieve briefly again, but when you actually indulge a taste for
the grim past--and reading the desperate gasps of the dying is
about as grim as it gets--either you need professional help or
you are trying to exploit the dead to some purpose.
Why would a respectable newspaper print
such material? Well, I recall a service station in Massachusetts
with gas pumps that blinked out a message with multiple exclamation
points never to forget 9/11, over and over, as you filled your
tank. What this had to do with selling gasoline I don't know,
but it reflected a frenzied, dangerous kind of thinking, the
thinking of those ready to subject themselves and others to some
form of control.
A recent poll shows that about 70% of
Americans believe that Iraq was involved in 9/11. That is to
say, two years after the fact, most Americans believe an absolute
fantasy, not supported by any evidence. Poor old Hussein had
a hard enough time for years just holding things together in
Iraq--a feat the vast armies and resources of the United States
appear incapable of repeating--without running off and getting
involved in terrorism.
All this should be abundantly clear to
Americans by now. They occupy Iraq. They have looked into its
every nook and cranny. There cannot be much there that American
administrators do not now understand, yet somehow the basic facts
of the situation remain unknown to most Americans. Instead they
embrace fantasy.
Indeed, it should have all been clear
long before invading and occupying the place. With all the electromagnetic
intercepts, spy satellites, and daily over-flights of the last
decade, Iraq probably qualified as the CIA's most intensively-recorded
country.
Bush unblinkingly calls Iraq the central
front in the war on terror, but that's what a skulking politician
does as he asks for another $87 billion to clean up a horrible
mess he created. And what a platter of tax-payer goodies to set
before friends and supporters! There's a mother load of public
paranoia and misinformation out there to be mined, and Bush isn't
about to set to work clearing it away.
America's velvet-glove fascists, the
neocons, have exploited 9/11 relentlessly. In some respects their
activities do resemble the Nazis' exploitation of the Reichstag
fire. Then, the act of a mentally unstable man from Holland was
immediately seized upon to justify a quick and systematic destruction
of the hated Weimar Republic, whose Chancellor Hitler had only
just been appointed.
Bush's government was floundering before
9/11. He was well along to earning full recognition of his vacuity--a
notable achievement considering the immense resources employed
to "airbrush" a President's every move. Fate in the
form of nineteen mentally unstable men from the Middle East intervened
and dumped at his feet the gifts of excessive public fear and
credulity.
Two years after 9/11 the world is forced
to accommodate an unhealthy, delusional America, like adults
fearful of confronting a disturbed child who paces the schoolyard
mumbling while carrying a loaded gun taken from home. It is not
an exaggeration to say that the situation often involves less
rationality and predictability than we knew from Leonid Brezhnev's
Soviet Union.
John Chuckman
lives in Canada and can be reached at: chuckman@counterpunch.org.
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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