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Today's
Stories
December 17, 2003
Andrew Cockburn
Saddam's
Last Act
December 16, 2003
Robert Fisk
Getting
Saddam...15 Years Too Late
Mahajan / Jensen
Saddam
in Irons: The Hard Truths Remain
John Halle
Matt
Gonzalez and Me
Josh Frank
The
Democrats and Saddam
Tariq Ali
Saddam
on Parade: the New Model of Imperialism
December 15, 2003
Robert Fisk
The Capture
of Saddam Won't Stop the Guerrilla War
Dave Lindorff
The
Saddam Dilemma
Abu Spinoza
Blowback on the Stand: The Trial of Saddam Hussein
Norman Solomon
For
Telling the Truth: the Strange Case of Katharine Gun
Patrick Cockburn
The
Capture of Saddam
Stew Albert
Joy to the World
December 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean--Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al--Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
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
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December
17, 2003
Spam, Poetry and Skin
Cream
Saddam's
Cold Comforts
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent
Al-Dwar, Iraq.
There was a kind of satisfaction, lying inside
Saddam's last hole in the earth. Seven months ago, I sat on his
red velvet presidential throne in the greatest of all his marble
palaces. And so there I was yesterday, lowering myself into the
damp, dark and grey concrete interior of his final retreat, the
midget bunker buried beside the Tigris--all of eight feet by
five-- and as near to an underground prison as any of his victims
might imagine.
Instead of chandeliers, there was just
a cheap plastic fan attached to an air vent. Ozymandias came
to mind. This, after all, was where the dreams finally crumbled
to dust. And it was cold.
He had food, of course--tins of cheap
luncheon meat and fresh fruit--and I found his last books in
a hut nearby: the philosophical works of Ibn Khaldun and the
religious--and pro-Shia -doctrines of the Abbasid theorist Imam
al-Shafei and a heap of volumes of Arab poetry. There were cassettes
of Arabic songs and some cheap pictures, of sheep at sunset and
Noah's Ark crowded with animals.
But this was no resistance headquarters,
no place from which to run a war or start an insurgency.
To climb inside this most famous of all
bolt-holes--and this, remember, was no Führer-bunker with
SS guards and switchboards and secretaries taking down last words
for posterity--I had to sit on the wooden entrance ledge and
swing my legs into a narrow aperture and find my footing on four
stairs made of earth. You use your arms to lower yourself into
this last remnant of Iraqi Baathist history.
Then you are sitting on the floor. There
is no light, no water, only the concrete walls, the vent and
a ceiling of wooden boards. Above the boards is earth and then
a thick concrete floor which, up above, is covered by the thick
concrete yard of a dilapidated farm hut.
It must have taken a long time to build--weeks
at least to construct the concrete hiding-place beneath the yard--and
I suspect there are many other bolt-holes along the reed banks
of the Tigris. Yet above this sullen underground cell was a kind
of paradise, of thick palm fronds and orange trees dripping gold
with mandarins, of thickets of tall reeds, of the sound of birds
buried in the treetops. There was even an old ,blue-painted boat
tucked away behind a wall of fronds, the last chance of escape
across the silver Tigris if the Americans closed in.
Of course, they closed in from two directions
on Saturday night, from the river and down the muddy laneway
along which soldiers of the American 4th Infantry Division led
me yesterday. As Captain Joseph Munger of the 4th Battalion,
42nd Field Artillery, pointed out, Saddam was easy to ambush,
but it was equally easy fo Saddam to hear them coming. He must
have rushed from the hut where he ate his food, spilling a plate
of beans and Turkish Delight on to the mud floor, I noticed,
and squirreled his portly self down the hole. When the Americans
searched the hut, they found nothing suspicious, except a pot
plant oddly positioned on top of some dried palm fronds, placed
there presumably by the two men later seized while trying to
escape. Underneath, they found the entrance to the hole.
The soldiers mooching around the "site"--their
word, as if it was a Sumerian city rather than a fraudulent,
muddy Baathist playpen--were indifferent to the point of tiredness.
They asked me to translate the Arabic inscription over Saddam's
bedroom--it began with the Koranic words, "In the name of
God, the compassionate, the merciful"--and they lent me
their torches to prowl round the Saddam kitchen. A female soldier
had written her sister's name in Arabic on her helmet. She wouldn't
say why. In Arabic, it read "Christine."
So what was Saddam like, they asked?
And I said the things that we scribes always say when people
want to hear things we have said many times over many years.
Saddam was ruthless, brutal, cruel --
these words are easy, of course--but also intelligent in a peasant
kind of way, shrewdly understanding the arrogance and the greed
of us, the West, America, and our preparedness to support him
in his evil wars. Captain Munger was a very cool customer, noting
that there had been no demonstrations in the village of Al-Dwar
"hostile, friendly or indifferent" and admitting that
there was no sign of a presidential lavatory at the "site".
In the village, there were some interesting
new graffiti. "Congratulations to the Iraqi Civil Defence
Corps for capturing Saddam", announced one scribe.
No one could find any evidence that the
new American-paid militia had helped to capture Saddam, but I
saw them on the Tigris dam a few hours later, all anxious to
protect their identities, all wearing hoods or face masks--just
as Saddam's militiamen did scarcely a year ago. "Your name,
Saddam, shakes America", a new graffiti said close by.
So what could we learn of Saddam yesterday
in this, his very last private residence in Iraq. Well, he had
chosen a hide only two hundred metres from a shrine marking his
own famous retreat across the Tigris river in 1959, on the run
as a wounded young guerrilla after trying to assassinate an earlier
president of Iraq.
Here it was that he dug the bullet out
of his body, and on a low hill within eyesight of this palm-grove
is the mosque that marks the spot where, in a coffee shop, Saddam
vainly pleaded to his fellow Iraqi tribesmen to help him escape.
Saddam, in his last days as a free man, had retreated into his
past, back to the days of glory that preceded his butcheries.
He had the use of a tiny generator, which
I found wired up to a miniature fridge. The fridge was in one
half of the hut--which stands only 10 feet from the hole--and
contained water bottles and a bottle of medicine with a label
marked Dropil. There was a tube of skin cream on the top, a tub
of moisturising cream, a sewing kit in a cellophane bag and--how
Saddam must have been plagued by mosquitoes unimpressed by Baath
party punishments--a can of Pif-paf. There were two old beds
and some filthy blankets.
In the little kitchen constructed next
door, there were sausages hanging to dry, bananas, oranges and,
near a washing-up bowl, tins of Jordanian chicken and beef luncheon
meat, heaps of Happy Tuna. Flies swarmed beneath the roof of
corrugated iron and I wasn't surprised to discover the bottles
of vegetable and fruit steriliser liquid in the cupboard. Only
the Mars bars looked fresh.
So what did Saddam discover here in the
last days? Peace of mind after the years of madness and barbarity?
A place to reflect on his awesome sin, how he took his country
from prosperity through foreign invasion and isolation and years
of torture and suppression into a world of humiliation and occupation?
The birds must have sung in the evening, the palm fronds above
him must have clustered against each other in the night.
But then there must have been the fear,
the constant knowledge that betrayal was only an orchard away.
It must have been cold in that hole. And no colder than when
the hands of Washington-the-all-Powerful reached out across oceans
and continents and came to rest on that odd-looking pot plant
and hauled the would-be Caliph from his tiny cell.
Robert Fisk is
a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's
hot new book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
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