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Today's
Stories
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
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
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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for More Stories.
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January
2, 2004
Red Alert 2016
It
Doesn't Have to Be Like This, But...
By STAN COX
[The following is from the transcript
of 250 Years of American History, a ten-hour documentary
series broadcast in July, 2026 by Exile TV, a satellite channel
run by U.S. citizens based in Mexico City]:
. . . For almost twelve years, 24 hours
a day, fighter jets had been patrolling the skies over New York
City. At twenty minutes after 9 pm on July 4, 2016, an Air Force
jet suddenly dropped from its flight pattern, accelerated, and
slammed into the base of the Freedom Tower. The Tower was at
that time the world's tallest building and successor to the World
Trade Center. In this amateur video, it can be seen to tremble
for a few seconds after the impact, without collapsing.
The Tower had been closed for the holiday
as a routine security measure, and that limited the number of
fatalities to 27, including the pilot. This was less than one
percent of the death toll experienced on the site in the September
11, 2001 tragedy, but it was the largest number killed on American
soil by foreign attackers since that time.
And a foreign attack it was. The following
day, the Fox/CNN News Network (now PATRIOT TV) obtained a videotape
in which the jet's pilot, 1st Lt. Omar Carson, announced his
reason for undertaking the suicide mission.
[Lt. Carson's image and voice]:
I was born Omar Khalaf in the city
of Samarra, in Iraq. The United States invaded my country in
March of 2003. I was 14 years old at the time, living with
my family in Samarra. My father was an employee of the Ministry
of Agriculture.
In July of 2004, American soldiers
came to our house, and they took my father away. I did not see
him again, and I never learned what became of him. Up to that
point, I had avoided any contact with the resistance fighters,
but soon after my father's disappearance, I joined and fought
with them.
During that time, the Americans learned
of my name from informers, so they went again to my house, but
my mother and sisters did not know where I was and could not
tell them. That night the soldiers took the decision to demolish
our house. During the demolition, neither the soldiers nor my
family members saw my 4-year-old sister run toward the house,
where a wall fell on her and crushed her.
When I learned of this, I vowed to
take my own revenge on the United States of America, in the names
of my father and sister. I will not discuss how I managed to
become high school student Omar Carson, a U.S. citizen born in
Chicago, or how I became an Air Force lieutenant, except to say
that this is indeed the land of opportunity for those willing
to work hard. Tomorrow, on your Independence Day, I will take
down your Freedom Tower, not at the behest of global terrorists,
who are people I do not know, and not for Islam, which does not
concern me, but to prove that your armies - those who took my
father and sister - do not and cannot make you safe.
The government's response to the attack
was swift - but, argued critics, it was also characteristically
off-target.
[Image and voice of the Secretary of
Homeland Security]: Those who have accused us in the past
of "crying wolf" have now been proven very, very wrong.
As of this hour, the United States and all of its installations
abroad will return to Enhanced Red Terror Alert status.
[Voice of the Director of the Coalition
Authority, accompanied by video of U.S. and Israeli tanks on
maneuver]: Iraq's borders have been sealed until further
notice. Coalition forces have quarantined Samarra, the terrorist's
hometown, and are conducting house-to-house sweeps.
[Image and voice of the President]:
Today, in a nation once again under attack, I am pleased to
sign this bill merging the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security,
and Justice into a single Department of Homeland Defense. The
Department's new motto inspires us all: "Embracing the Planet
as Our Homeland."
At the end of a two-week investigation,
a team of structural engineers came to a startling conclusion:
The Freedom Tower could not be made "safely occupiable",
and it would have to be demolished. With the world economy in
crisis, the Tower had had a 60% vacancy rate at the time of the
attack, so its demise was seen to make sense economically as
well. History's most ambitious demolition project was scheduled,
at the request of the Administration in Washington, for September
11, 2016. It was planned as a dramatic event that would galvanize
the public and shake the country out of its malaise.
But the nation was in no mood for another
terror spectacle. A quarter of a million American troops were
stationed throughout the world - and at that point they were
engaged in deadly combat in six Asian nations, as well as the
Occupied Territories of Gaza, the West Bank, and Iraq. People
had gradually become immune to Orange terror alerts, so the government
had increasingly moved to Red alerts and, finally, had felt it
necessary to create a new and very unpopular alert level called
Enhanced Red Terror Status. In the process, the Bill of Rights
was gradually being "transcended", in the Administration's
terminology.
The economy was in its worst and most
persistent downturn since the Great Depression eight decades
before, and the government, stretched to the breaking point by
the War on Terror, could offer little help to out-of-work and
hungry citizens. Its only program addressing unemployment was
the military draft. A record four and a half million Americans
were locked in jails, prisons, and Homeland Detention Centers.
The hapless Democratic Party was offering no convincing strategies
for recovery, and was clearly incapable of mounting a serious
challenge to the Republicans' sixteen-year grip on the White
House.
A weary people could find consolation
in one fact: Since the beginning of a decline in world oil production
in 2007, Americans were considerably better off than people in
other parts of the industrial world. The assured flow of oil
from underexploited fields in Iraq and Central Asia had, according
to many economists, justified the cost of military operations
in that part of the globe. But plentiful oil could not begin
to heal the many wounds that the War on Terror had opened.
On the night of September 10, several
dozen square blocks of Lower Manhattan were evacuated, and at
precisely 8:45 the next morning, a series of carefully timed
explosions brought down the Freedom Tower. It slumped into a
massive dust cloud - an eery replay of the Twin Towers' collapse
fifteen years before. Small groups of people watched from distant
rooftops. The television audience at that hour was small. Families
of those killed in the attack grieved at home, in private. The
dust cloud served chiefly as a backdrop for the Republican National
Convention, which was meeting that week in New York, as it had
in 2004, 2008, and 2012.
[Image and voice of Vice President Rice
addressing the convention]: Once again a pall descends over
this great city, and once again our nation hears the call of
destiny, our people a call to heroism. This party pledges to
strike at the root of the evil that has raised this cloud. Those
who plotted this deed can run, but they cannot hide!
Despite saturation coverage by the media,
a sullen public took little notice of the Tower's fall. By the
weekend, the demolition was out of the headlines, replaced by
the catastrophic Hurricane Kristi, which made landfall on the
east coast of Florida on the night of the 12th.
All contents or structural materials
of any value had been stripped from the Freedom Tower. With
no search of the rubble required, cleanup was completed well
before the November election . . .
Stan Cox
lives in Salina, Kansas. He can be reached at: t.stan@cox.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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