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Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Recent
Stories
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
August
11, 2003
Douglas
Valentine
Homeland Security for Whom?
Mickey
Z.
Bush's Progress
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: Meet the New Bitch, Same
as the Old
Elaine
Cassel
Indicting DNA
Dr. Mohammad
Omar Farooq
Civil Liberties and Uncivil Super-Patriotism
Uri
Avnery
Who Will Save Abu Mazen?
Website
of the Day
RIAA Subpoena Clearinghouse
August
9 / 10, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
California's Glorious Recall!
Saul
Landau
Bush and King Henry
Gary
Leupp
On Terrorism, Methodism, "Wahhabism"
and the Censored 9/11 Report
Paul de
Rooij
The Parade of the Body Bags
Michael
Egan
History and the Tragedy of American Diplomacy
Rob Eshelman
A Home of Our Own
Daoud
Kuttab
Life as an ID Card
Philip
Agee
Terror and Civil Society: Instruments of US Policy in Cuba
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Marc Racicot: Bush's Main Man
Walt Brasch
Schwarzenegger, "Hollyweird"
and the Rigtheous Right
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush, Bribery and Berlusconi
Josh Frank
Mean, Mean Howard Dean
Elaine
Cassel
Will the Death Penalty Ever Die?
Sean Carter
Total Recall
Poets'
Basement
Hamod, Engel, Albert
August
8, 2003
John
Chuckman
What the US Says Goes
Roberto
Barreto
Defend the Vieques 12!
Bruce Gagnon
Iraq War Emboldens Bush Space Plans
Elaine
Cassel
The Reign of John Ashcroft
Dave
Lindorff
Snoops Night Out
Website
of the Day
Zero Boy
August
7, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
It the US a "Terrorist Magnet?"
Toni
Solo
Neo-liberal Nicaragua: a New Banana
Republic
Adam Lebowitz
Hiroshima Commemorated: the View from Japan
Hanan
Ashrawi
When the Bully Whines
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Conscience Takes a Holiday
Jason
Leopold
Wolfowitz Lets Slip: Iraq Not Behind 9/11; No Ties to Al-Qaeda
Mike Kimaid
What's the Score?
Elaine
Cassel
The Smell of VICTORY: Ashcroft's Latest Stinkbomb
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
August 6, 2003
Steve
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause: It's Not
Easy Confronting King Coal
David
Krieger
Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Robert
Fisk
The Ghosts of Uday and Qusay
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush's War on the National Forests
Elaine
Cassel
No Fly Lists
Stan
Goff
Military Equipment and Pneumonia
Hugh Sansom
An Open Letter to Nicholas Kristof on the Nuking of Japan
August
5, 2003
Uri
Avnery
The Prisoner of Ramallah: Arafat at
74
Forrest
Hylton
Terrorism and Political Trials: the
View from Bolivia
Ray
McGovern
"We Cook Estimates to Go"
David
Morse
Poindexter's Gambit
Edward
Said
Orientallism: 25 Years Later
George
W. Bush
My Darn Good Resumé
Hammond
Guthrie
It's Incremental, Watson!
Website
of the Day
National Prayer Day
August 4, 2003
Bruce
K. Gagnon
Another Peace Activist Detained by
Airport Cops: My Story
David
Lindorff
Fear-Mongering About Social Security
Mark
Zepezauer
George F. Will: Descent into Self-Parody
James
Plummer
Tracking You Through the Mail
Mickey
Z.
Marriage Insecurity from Sharon to Bush
Bruce
Jackson
News that Isn't News: How the NYT's
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August
2 / 3, 2003
Tamara
R. Piety
Nike's Full Court Press Breaks Down
Francis
Boyle
My Alma Mater, the University of Chicago, is a Moral Cesspool
David
Vest
Sons of Paleface: Pictures from Death's Other Side
Neve Gordon
Nightlife in Jerusalem
Uri
Avnery
Their Master's Voice:
Bush, Blair and Intelligence Snafus
Robert
Fisk
Paternalistic Democracy for Iraq
Jerry
Kroth
Israel, Yellowcake and the Media
Noah Leavitt
What's Driving the Liberian Bloodbath: Is the US Obligated to
Intervene?
Saul
Landau
The Film Industry: Business and Ideology
Ron Jacobs
One Big Prison Yard: the Meaning of George Jackson
Thomas
Croft
In the Deep, Deep Rough: Reflections on Augusta
Amadi Ajamu
Def Sham: Russell Simmons New Black Leader?
Poets'
Basement
Vega, Witherup, Albert and Fleming
August
1, 2003
Joanne
Mariner
Stopping Prison Rape
Alex Coolman
Who Moved My Soap: Trivializing
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Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Stan Goff
Injury and Decorum: The Missing Wounded in Iraq
Wayne
Madsen
Europe Unplugs from the Matrix
Robert
Fisk
Wolfowitz the Censor
Elaine
Cassel
Ashcroft Loses Big in Puerto Rico
Website
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Stop Prisoner Rape
July
31, 2003
Ray
McGovern
The Prostitution of Intelligence
Brian
Cloughley
Wolfowitz's Operative Statement
Sheldon
Hull
The RIAA's Jihad:
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Elaine
Cassel
The Next Time You Crack a Lawyer Joke, Think of These Attorneys
Sheldon
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True Lies: Propaganda and Bush's
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Guthrie
Speculation Blues
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Army of One?
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August
19, 2003
While Zapatistas Shout:
"Gora Euskadi!"
Fox
Government Rounds Up Mexican Basques and Ships Them to Aznar's
Torture Chambers
By JOHN ROSS
A traveler motoring through southeastern Chiapas
these days is apt to encounter neatly-lettered road signs advising
that one is now entering "Autonomous Zapatista Rebel Territory".
Several such notices are posted along the two-lane black-top
that winds through the highlands up to Oventic, the site of one
of five recently inaugurated "caracoles" (literally
"spirals") from which the Zapatista Army of National
Liberation (EZLN) is building regional autonomy.
But as one nears Oventic, other road
signs pop up in the nearby cornfields. "EUSKAL PRESOAK!
EUSKAL HERRIA!" reads one announcement, against which a
Tzotzil-speaking Zapatista militia man leans, casually puffing
on a cigarette. The sign, however, is not written in Tzotzil
but in an equally esoteric lingo, Euskara, or the language of
the Basques, and when translated demands "Let the Basque
prisoners return to their homeland!" The road sign in Euskara
is a forceful reminder of the odd bond between the largely Mayan
EZLN and those who struggle for the independence of the Basque
Country ("Pais Vasco" or "Euskadi.")
"Gora Euskadi!" (Long Live
the Basque Homeland!) greeted a ski-masked Indian comandante,
Zebedeo, at the recent Oventic inauguration festivities, "that
this cry will never be extinguished even in the prisons and torture
chambers of the Spanish government!" The comandante then
explained that the EZLN supports "the political and cultural
struggle" for Basque independence but not the terror tactics
of the notorious ETA ("Euskara Ta Askatasuna" or Basque
Homeland and Liberty.)
Indeed, a bitter epistolary conflict
has erupted between the EZLN's quixotic spokesperson Subcomandante
Marcos and that homicidal terrorist band--at one point in the
angry colloquy, Marcos even feared that he could be ETA's next
victim.
Last November, after 18 months of frozen
silence, the Subcomandante broke his word fast with a rambling,
cheeky comunique addressed to Zapatista supporters at a Madrid
conclave. The screed lacerated Spanish king Juan Carlos ("a
constipated old man") and right-wing prime minister Jose
Maria Aznar (a "pipsqueak" and a "donkey")
but reserved special vitriol for National Audience judge Baltazar
Garzon for his persecution of supporters of Basque independence.
Garzon, often mentioned as a candidate
for the Nobel Peace Prize, is best known for his flawed attempts
to extradite ex-Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet to Spain to
answer charges of human rights atrocities during his tyrannical
regime (1973-89.) The Judge has been more successful in obtaining
the extradition of accused Argentinean torturer Ricardo Cavallo
from Mexico--Cavallo is charged with the disappearance of at
least 5000 Leftists during the "dirty war" (1976-83)
in that southern cone nation.
Garzon, whose judicial position allows
him ample investigative powers, first won public attention in
Spain when he revealed that former Socialist prime minister Felipe
Gonzalez had sponsored a counter-terrorism unit, the GAL, deemed
responsible for the killings of 27 Basque independence fighters
in Spain and France, a disclosure that helped bring down the
Gonzalez government.
But Judge Garzon soon turned his legal
guns upon the Basque independence movement itself. Hundreds were
taken prisoner and tortured (as substantiated each year by Amnesty
International), newspapers have been shuttered, and political
parties proscribed--Batasuna, outlawed late last year as alleged
"apologists for terrorism", won 11% of the Basque vote
in the last elections and held seats in both the national and
local parliaments.
In his stinging November note, Marcos
labeled Garzon "a grotesque clown" who demonstrates
"his true fascist avocation" by persecuting the Basques.
The Judge, the dyed white streak in his ample head of hair bristling
like a bantee rooster, immediately fired back. The rebel leader
was "a ridiculous figure with his pipe", and "a
miserable coward who insults" the nearly 900 victims of
ETA terrorism by bad-mouthing Garzon's crusade. Baltazar Garzon
also threw down the gauntlet, challenging the Subcomandante to
a debate "without masks or disguises where and whenever
you like."
Not to be daunted, the unflappable Zapatista
mouthpiece immediately set a date and a place, April at Lanzarote
in the Canary Islands near the home of Nobel Prize-winning author
Jose Saramago, a great fan of the rebels. Marcos also summoned
ETA and Batasuna and the Aznar government to Lanzarote for a
"Festival of the Word" and implored the ETArras to
declare a 177-day truce until the talks could be entabled.
Suggesting that the Subcomandante was
"mentally unbalanced" and suffering from delusions
of grandeur, Spanish authorities turned the invite hands down.
ETA was even less diplomatic, tagging the proposed talks "a
pantomime" and expressing the suspicion that Marcos was
just trying to get his picture back "on the front pages
of the newspapers and the popular tee-shirts." Moreover,
by asking for a truce, the Zapatistas were intervening in the
internal dynamic of the Basque independence movement. The aspersions
put a quick damper on "The Fiesta of the Word" and
the fracaso soon faded from public visibility.
Then this past August 8th, as the EZLN
was preparing to inaugurate the new "caracoles" with
their regional autonomous authorities, who should show up in
Chiapas but Judge Baltazar Garzon himself. He was on vacation,
Hizzoner insisted to reporters at the airport in Tuxtla Gutierrez,
the state capitol, but did not miss the opportunity to diss the
Zapatistas' "caracoles" as being "Illegal"
because they do not conform to the Mexican Constitution. Marcos
was a charlatan who was bamboozling the Indians the Judge insisted,
and soon disappeared into the foliage "on vacation."
The unexplained absence of Subcomandante
Marcos at the Oventic ceremonies August 8th-10th has led to wild
speculation that the two adversaries had finally conducted their
long-awaited debate--in private.
More probably, Garzon's mystery trip
to Chiapas obeyed his obsession with ETA and not the EZLN--although
he may well have had an eye ou the ties between the two groups.
The Judge's touch-downs in Mexico City and Tuxtla came at a moment
when President Vicente Fox--with whom Garzon met in July--has
ordered a crack-down on suspected ETA terrorists and sympathizers
living in Mexico. In most cases, detention and extradition orders
have been crafted by Garzon's office.
Since 1996, when then-presidents Ernesto
Zedillo and Felipe Gonzalez inked an extradition treaty that
was finalized under Aznar (the agreement opened the door to Spanish
support for a free trade pact with the European Union), 36 Basques
have been detained and expelled from Mexico into the waiting
arms of the Spanish police. One deportee died under suspicious
circumstances during a 1997 round-up in which Spanish police
officials directly participated in violation of Mexican law.
Now Fox is eager to demonstrate to Aznar
and the diminutive prime minister's big boss, George Bush, that
he too can be tough on terrorism.
Item: in late April, Lorenzo Llona, a
naturalized citizen, was detained on his way to work in the central
Mexican city of Zacatecas and held for extradition to Spain on
allegations that he had participated in a triple murder in the
Basque province of Guipuzcoa on June 24th, 1981 (Basques picked
up in Mexico are increasingly charged with crimes dating back
to the 1980s.) The only problem with this scenario is that Llona
had already emigrated to Mexico when the murders were committed
and had the paperwork to prove it. Nonetheless, Garzon pushes
ahead with the extradition claim, a process that could take years
while Llona remains behind bars. Item--On July 4th, Miguel Ebxanda,
a Basque who may have been in Mexico illegally, was nabbed by
immigration agents, driven to the Mexico City airport, and deported
to Madrid where Spanish police took immediate custody, before
anyone even knew he was missing. Such summary deportations of
Basques have become common practice here when the suspect's papers
are adjudged to be not in order.
Item: On July 18th, in a muscular show
of force with Judge Garzon in country, Federal Investigation
Agency (AFI) robo-cops broke down doors in four Mexican cities
and arrested sic Basques and three Mexicans for allegedly laundering
ETA moneys (another Garzon investigation.)
All of the Basques arrested were prosperous
middle-aged business men and women, some of them naturalized
or married to Mexicans. At least one of the arrestees was so
confident of his legal status in Spain that he had bought a ticket
to move back to Pais Vasco. He and his wife were reportedly waiting
for the moving van in front of their Monterrey home when he was
collared by the AFI.
The morning after the July 18th raids,
code-named "Operation Donasti", Aznar phoned Fox to
congratulate the Mexican president for his tough stance in the
War on Terror.
Basques first came to Mexico with the
Conquest--Hernan Cortez carried eight Vascos in his crew. The
Franciscan missionary Vasco de Quiroga evangelized western Mexico.
Basques and their descendants have assembled immense fortunes
here and are captains of industry and commerce (one example:
the Azcarriaga family, principle owners of the Televisa conglomerate.)
Basque names are ubiquitous--an Echeverria has been president
and an Arizmendi a bishop.
Basque refugees from the Spanish civil
war (1936-39) were welcomed to Mexico by a sympathetic president
Lazaro Cardenas. They established businesses and social centers
like the Centro Vasco in the old quarter of the capital, for
decades a venue noted for conviviality and fine dining. But now
the Centro Vasco has fallen on dark days. The AFI and Spanish
police are thought to surveil its elegant quarters--the six accused
money launderers often met there.
"Being Basque in Mexico these days
is a lot like being an Arab in the U.S. right after 9/11"
observes Javier Elorriaga, a Mexican of Basque descent and a
civil Zapatista leader.
Why Garzon was dirt-digging in Chiapas
has not yet emerged from the mud but there is little doubt that
he kept tabs on the Zapatista celebrations up at Oventic. Despite
its astringent relations with ETA, the EZLN is routinely attacked
by his detractors for backing the terrorists. In a paroxysm of
xenophobia, ex-president Zedillo once accused the rebels of harboring
ETArras in peace camps established by the civil society in the
jungles and mountains of Chiapas, and immigration agents in the
region continue to zealously pursue possible Basque visitors.
But the coincidences between the Indians
and Basque country has less to do with terrorist plots than it
does with the essential nature of their struggles. Both are nations
within nations--fourth world nations if you will--and both fight
for meaningful autonomy from what they regard as the "mal
gobierno: (bad government.)
John Ross was
a resident of Pais Vasco during the late 1970s, the most explosive
years of the struggle for Basque independence.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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