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Today's Stories

October 1, 2003

Sean Donahue
Wesley Clark and the "No Fly" List

 

September 30, 2003

After Dark
Arnold's 1977 Photo Shoot

Dave Lindorff
The Poll of the Shirt: Bush Isn't Wearing Well

Tom Crumpacker
The Cuba Fixation: Shaking Down American Travelers

Robert Fisk
A Lesson in Obfuscation

Charles Sullivan
A Message to Conservatives

Suren Pillay
Edward Said: a South African Perspective

Naeem Mohaiemen
Said at Oberlin: Hysteria in the Face of Truth

Amy Goodman / Jeremy Scahill
Does a Felon Rove the White House?

Website of the Day
The Edward Said Page


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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October 1, 2003

Xenophobia as State Policy

Congressman Barrett's Collective Punishment

By RON JACOBS

Exploiting the fear that many Americans now associate with the date of September 11th, Congressman J. Gresham Barrett of South Carolina introduced a bill (HR 3075) on September 11, 2003 that would prevent any person from a country considered to be a "state sponsor" of terrorism." from entering the United States, except by permission of the Attorney General. In addition, the bill would require that anyone from these countries who is currently in the country and is not a landed immigrant would have 60 days to leave. Like most bills of this nature, the list of countries reads like John Ashcroft's nightmare: Iran, Cuba, Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Iraq. Of course, this list can be changed by the US government at any time, depending on the particular needs of its foreign policy at a given time. The bill is currently in the Judiciary Committee.

Not only does this bill label whole nations of individuals as terrorists, no matter what those individuals might actually think, but it also raises the likelihood that individuals from those nations who are already residing in this country will be the targets of discrimination and physical attacks by other US residents. Indeed, as history has proven time and time again, a person would only need to look like somebody from one of these countries to be subject to this scenario. If one recalls the days immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, many non-Arab US residents were attacked by angry and fearful Americans looking for revenge, despite the fact that their victims were neither Arab nor "terrorists." Why? Because they looked like "terrorists" to their attackers. Of course, being Arab was not a justification for these attacks either.

By including Cuba on this list, the authors of this bill prove their true motivation-the desire for a United States where dark-skinned people can be kept out at will. The only Cubans who have entered this country since the revolution who could be considered terrorists are those on the payroll of various US intelligence agencies. These individuals' mark was left at the Watergate in 1972 and on the downed Cubana airliner over Venezuela in 1976, to name just a couple of their deeds. Instead of treating these proven terrorists in the same manner as the suspected terrorists currently languishing in the Pentagon's detention and torture center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, their leader Orlando Bosch (whose prints are all over the bombing of the Cubana airliner and an attack on a Polish freighter in Miami harbor) was pardoned by G. W. Bush's daddy before he left office.

In the matter of Iran, it is somewhat ironic that it is the Iranian students-the very group that has been foremost in the struggle against the clerical dictatorship that rules the country--who would suffer most from this legislation. Already, the United States has closed the US offices of the National Council of Resistance in Iran (NCRI), which represents the best-organized and most established group opposed to the Khomeini government and its successor. One has to wonder at the logic here. Or, perhaps, something more insidious is at work; something to do with future (or current) business deals perhaps.

I shudder to think of how the second part of this law would be enforced, should it pass. In my mind, I see midnight raids and daylight roundups of those individuals who already registered with the INS during the series of widely publicized registration deadlines in the past year. I can also see schools and workplaces turning over names of students to law enforcement agencies operating under the auspices of the Department of Homeland Security. Classroom and dormitory arrests, detention centers, husbands separated from their wives and parents from their children. In short, the 21st century version of the Palmer Raids with the accompanying technological enhancements.

As for the people from other countries on the list, it's just more of the same. It doesn't matter what one's opinions are regarding their country's government, it only matters what country one's passport is from. This legislation is not about preventing attacks on the United States, it's about scapegoating whole segments of humanity for the failures and selfishness of America's foreign policy. Mr. Barrett's agenda is not an agenda that defends the freedoms that we are told this country represents, nor is it an agenda that will breed goodwill among other nations or their peoples. Our country's history is a history of immigration, with all that that means. It is important that this bill be killed in committee, before it hits the House floor.

Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the Weather Underground.

He can be reached at: rjacobs@zoo.uvm.edu


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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