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Today's
Stories
December 12, 2003
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
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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December
12, 2003
The Inhuman Stain
Saying
Yes to State Terror
By CHRIS FLOYD
There is a horrible scandal eating away the heart
of the American body politic. Among the many corrupted currents
loosed upon the nation by the Bush Regime, this scandal is perhaps
the worst, for it abets all the others and breeds new pestilence,
new perversions at every turn.
Last month, Maher Arar of Canada detailed
his ordeal at the hands of Attorney General John Ashcroft's shadowy
security "organs." On his way back home from a family
holiday in Tunis, the Syrian-born Arar--16 years a Canadian citizen--was
seized at a New York airport. Jailed and interrogated without
charges, on unspecified allegations of unspecified connections
to unspecified terrorist groups, he was then summarily deported,
without a hearing, to Syria. When he told the Homeland Chekists
he would be tortured there--his family was marked down as dissidents
by Syria's Baathist regime--the Chekists replied that their organ
"was not the body that deals with the Geneva Conventions
regarding torture." They shackled him and flew him to the
American-friendly regime in Jordan; from there he was bundled
across the border to Damascus.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking
of.
For 10 months and 10 days, Arar was held
in a dank cell in Syria: a "grave," he called it, a
three-by-six unlighted hole filled with cat and rat piss falling
down from the grating overhead. He was beaten over and over,
often with electrical cable, for weeks on end, kept awake for
days, made to witness and hear even more exquisite tortures applied
to other prisoners. He was forced to sign false confessions.
Ashcroft's Baathist comrades had a pre-set storyline they wanted
filled in: that Arar had gone to Afghanistan, attended terrorist
training camps, was plotting mayhem--the usual template. Arar,
who had spent years working as a computer consultant for a Boston-based
high-tech firm, had done none of those things. Yet he was whipped,
broken and tortured into submission.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking
of.
Arar's case is not extraordinary. In
the past two years, the Bushist organs have "rendered"
thousands of detainees, without charges, hearings or the need
to produce any evidence whatsoever, into the hands of regimes
which the U.S. government itself denounces for the widespread
use of torture. Apparatchiks of the organs make no secret of
the practice--or of their knowledge that the "rendered"
will indeed be beaten, burned, drugged, raped, even killed. "I
do it with my eyes open," one renderer told the Washington
Post. Detainees--including lifelong American residents--have
been snatched from the homes, businesses, schools, from streets
and airports, and sent to torture pits like Syria, Morocco, Egypt,
Jordan--even the stateless chaos of Somalia, where Ashcroft simply
dumped more than 30 Somali-Americans last year, without charges,
without evidence, without counsel, and with no visible means
of support, as the London Times reports.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking
of.
Of course, the American organs needn't
rely exclusively on foreigners for torture anymore. Under the
enlightened leadership of Ashcroft, Bush, Donald Rumsfeld and
other upstanding Christian statesmen, America has now established
its own centers for what the organs call "operational flexibility."
These include bases in Bagram, Afghanistan and Diego Garcia,
the Indian Ocean island that was forcibly depopulated in the
1960s to make way for a U.S. military installation. Here, the
CIA runs secret interrogation units that are even more restricted
than the American concentration camp on Guantanamo Bay. Detainees--again,
held without charges or evidentiary requirements--are "softened
up" by beatings at the hands of military police and Special
Forces troops before being subjected to "stress and duress"
techniques: sleep deprivation (officially condemned as a torture
method by the U.S. government), physical and psychological disorientation,
withholding of medical treatment, etc. When beatings and "duress"
don't work, detainees are then "packaged"--hooded,
gagged, bound to stretchers with duct tape--and "rendered"
into less dainty hands elsewhere.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking
of.
Not content with capture and torture,
the organs have been given presidential authority to carry out
raids and kill "suspected terrorists" (including Americans)
on their own volition--without oversight, without charges, without
evidence--anywhere in the world, including on American soil.
In addition to this general license to kill, Bush has claimed
the power to designate anyone he pleases "an enemy combatant"
and have them "rendered" into the hands of the organs
or simply killed at his express order--without charges, without
evidence, with no judicial or legislative oversight whatsoever.
The life of every American citizen--indeed, every person on earth--is
now at the disposal of his arbitrary whim. Never in history has
an individual claimed such universal power--and had the force
to back it up.
But this is not the scandal we were speaking
of.
All of the above facts--each of them
manifest violations of international law and/or the U.S. Constitution
-- have been cheerfully attested to, for years now, by the organs'
own appartchiks, in the Post, the NY Times, Newsweek, the Guardian,
the Economist and other high-profile, mainstream publications.
The stories appear--then they disappear. There is no reaction.
No outcry in Congress or the courts--the supposed guardians of
the people's rights--beyond a few wan calls for more formality
in the concentration camp processing or judicial "warrants"
for torture. And among the great mass of "the people"
itself, there is--nothing. Silence. Inattention. Acquiescence.
State terrorism--lawless seizure, filthy torture, official murder--is
simply accepted, a part of "normal life," as in Nazi
Germany or Stalin's empire, where "decent people" with
"nothing to hide" approved and applauded the work of
the "organs" in "defending national security."
This
is the scandal, this is the nation's festering shame. This acquiescence
to state terror will breed--and attract--a thousand evils for
every one it supposedly prevents.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. His CounterPunch piece on Rumsfeld's
plan to provoke terrorist attacks came in at Number 4
on Project Censored's final tally of the Most Censored stories
of 2002. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
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