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Today's
Stories
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
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
Click Here
for More Stories.
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November
14 / 23, 2003
Hold On to Your Humanity
An Open Letter to GIs in
Iraq
By STAN GOFF
(US Army Retired)
Dear American serviceperson in Iraq,
I am a retired veteran of the army, and
my own son is among you, a paratrooper like I was. The changes
that are happening to every one of you--some more extreme than
others--are changes I know very well. So I'm going to say some
things to you straight up in the language to which you are accustomed.
In 1970, I was assigned to the 173rd
Airborne Brigade, then based in northern Binh Dinh Province in
what was then the Republic of Vietnam. When I went there, I had
my head full of shit: shit from the news media, shit from movies,
shit about what it supposedly mean to be a man, and shit from
a lot of my know-nothing neighbors who would tell you plenty
about Vietnam even though they'd never been there, or to war
at all.
The essence of all this shit was that
we had to "stay the course in Vietnam," and that we
were on some mission to save good Vietnamese from bad Vietnamese,
and to keep the bad Vietnamese from hitting beachheads outside
of Oakland. We stayed the course until 58,000 Americans were
dead and lots  more maimed for life, and 3,000,000 Southeast
Asians were dead. Ex-military people and even many on active
duty played a big part in finally bringing that crime to a halt.
When I started hearing about weapons
of mass destruction that threatened the United States from Iraq,
a shattered country that had endured almost a decade of trench
war followed by an invasion and twelve years of sanctions, my
first question was how in the hell can anyone believe that this
suffering country presents a threat to the United States? But
then I remembered how many people had believed Vietnam threatened
the United States. Including me.
When that bullshit story about weapons
came apart like a two-dollar shirt, the politicians who cooked
up this war told everyone, including you, that you would be greeted
like great liberators. They told us that we were in Vietnam to
make sure everyone there could vote.
What they didn't tell me was that before
I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning
villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests,
killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and commiting
rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging
over that weren't in a position to figure out the difference
between me--just in country--and the people who had done those
things to them.
What they didn't tell you is that over
a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition,
medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those
who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young
children.
My son who is over there now has a baby.
We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven
months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy
it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know
your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them.
Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not
going to forget that the United States government was largely
responsible for the deaths of half a million kids.
So the lie that you would be welcomed
as liberators was just that. A lie. A lie for people in the United
States to get them to open their purse for this obscenity, and
a lie for you to pump you up for a fight.
And when you put this into perspective,
you know that if you were an Iraqi, you probably wouldn't be
crazy about American soldiers taking over your towns and cities
either. This is the tough reality I faced in Vietnam. I knew
while I was there that if I were Vietnamese, I would have been
one of the Vietcong.
But there we were, ordered into someone
else's country, playing the role of occupier when we didn't know
the people, their language, or their culture, with our head full
of bullshit our so-called leaders had told us during training
and in preparation for deployment, and even when we got there.
There we were, facing people we were ordered to dominate, but
any one of whom might be pumping mortars at us or firing AKs
at us later that night. The question we stated to ask is who
put us in this position?
In our process of fighting to stay alive,
and in their process of trying to expel an invader that violated
their dignity, destroyed their property, and killed their innocents,
we were faced off against each other by people who made these
decisions in $5,000 suits, who laughed and slapped each other
on the back in Washington DC with their fat fucking asses stuffed
full of cordon blue and caviar.
They chumped us. Anyone can be chumped.
That's you now. Just fewer trees and
less water.
We haven't figured out how to stop the
pasty-faced, oil-hungry backslappers in DC yet, and it looks
like you all might be stuck there for a little longer. So I want
to tell you the rest of the story.
I changed over there in Vietnam and they
were not nice changes either. I started getting pulled into something--something
that craved other peole's pain. Just to make sure I wasn't regarded
as a "fucking missionary" or a possible rat, I learned
how to fit myself into that group that was untouchable, people
too crazy to fuck with, people who desired the rush of omnipotence
that comes with setting  someone's house on fire just
for the pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman,
or child, with hardly a second thought. People who had the power
of life and death--because they could.
The anger helps. It's easy to hate everyone
you can't trust because of your circumstances, and to rage about
what you've seen, what has happened to you, and what you have
done and can't take back.
It was all an act for me, a cover-up
for deeper fears I couldn't name, and the reason I know that
is that we had to dehumanize our victims before we did the things
we did. We knew deep down that what we were doing was wrong.
So they became dinks or gooks, just like Iraqis are now being
transformed into ragheads or hajjis. People had to be reduced
to "niggers" here before they could be lynched. No
difference. We convinced ourselves we had to kill them to survive,
even when that wasn't true, but something inside us told us that
so long as they were human beings, with the same intrinsic value
we had as human beings, we were not allowed to burn their homes
and barns, kill their animals, and sometimes even kill them.
So we used these words, these new names, to reduce them, to strip
them of their essential humanity, and then we could do things
like adjust artillery fire onto the cries of a baby.
Until that baby was silenced, though,
and here's the important thing to understand, that baby never
surrendered her humanity. I did. We did. That's the thing you
might not get until it's too late. When you take away the humantiy
of another, you kill your own humanity. You attack your own soul
because it is standing in the way.
So we finish our tour, and go back to
our families, who can see that even though we function, we are
empty and incapable of truly connecting to people any more, and
maybe we can go for months or even years before we fill that
void where we surrendered our humanity, with chemical anesthetics--drugs,
alcohol, until we realize that the void can never be filled and
we shoot ourselves, or head off into the street where we can
disappear with the flotsam of society, or we hurt others, esepcially
those who try to love us, and end up as another incarceration
statistic or a mental patient.
You can ever escape that you became a
racist because you made the excuse that you needed that to survive,
that you took things away from people that you can never give
back, or that you killed a piece of yourself that you may never
get back.
Some of us do. We get lucky and someone
gives a damn enough to emotionally resuscitate us and bring us
back to life. Many do not.
I live with the rage every day of my
life, even when no one else sees it. You might hear it in my
words. I hate being chumped.
So here is my message to you. You will
do what you have to do to survive, however you define survival,
while we do what we have to do to stop this thing. But don't
surrender your humanity. Not to fit in. Not to prove yourself.
Not for an adrenaline rush. Not to lash out when you are angry
and frustrated. Not for some ticket-punching fucking military
careerist to make his bones on. Especially not for the Bush-Cheney
Gas & Oil Consortium.
The big bosses are trying to gain control
of the world's energy supplies to twist the arms of future economic
competitors. That's what's going on, and you need to understand
it, then do what you need to do to hold on to your humanity.
The system does that; tells you you are some kind of hero action
figures, but uses you as gunmen. They chump you.
Your so-called civilian leadership sees
you as an expendable commodity. They don't care about your nightmares,
about the DU that you are breathing, about the lonliness, the
doubts, the pain, or about how you humanity is stripped away
a piece at a time. They will cut your benefits, deny your illnesses,
and hide your wounded and dead from the public. They already
are.
They don't care. So you have to. And
to preserve your own humanity, you must recognize the humanity
of the people whose nation you now occupy and know that both
you and they are victims of the filthy rich bastards who are
calling the shots.
They are your enemies--The Suits--and
they are the enemies of peace, and the enemies of your families,
especially if they are Black families, or immigrant families,
or poor families. They are thieves and bullies who take and never
give, and they say they will "never run" in Iraq, but
you and I know that they will never have to run, because they
fucking aren't there. You are
They'll skin and grin while they are
getting what they want from you, and throw you away like a used
condom when they are done. Ask the vets who are having their
benefits slashed out from under them now. Bushfeld and their
cronies are parasites, and they are the sole beneficiaries of
the chaos you are learning to live in. They get the money. You
get the prosthetic devices, the nightmares, and the mysterious
illnesses.
So if your rage needs a target, there
they are, responsible for your being there, and responsible for
keeping you there. I can't tell you to disobey. That would probably
run me afoul of the law. That will be a decision you will have
to take when and if the circumstances and your own conscience
dictate. But it perfeclty legal for you to refuse illegal orders,
and orders to abuse or attack civilians are illegal. Ordering
you to keep silent about these crimes is also illegal.
I can tell you, without fear of legal
consequence, that you are never under any obligation to hate
Iraqis, you are never under any obligation to give yourself over
to racism and nihilism and the thirst to kill for the sake of
killing, and you are never under any obligation to let them drive
out the last vestiges of your capacity to see and tell the truth
to yourself and to the world. You do not owe them your souls.
Come home safe, and come home sane. The
people who love you and who have loved you all your lives are
waiting here, and we want you to come back and be able to look
us in the face. Don't leave your souls in the dust there like
another corpse.
Hold on to your humanity.
Stan Goff
US Army (Ret.)
Stan Goff
is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a
member of the BRING
THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special
Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier.
Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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