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Today's
Stories
November 11, 2003
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
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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Veteran's
Day Edition
November 11, 2003
The Invisible Man
Resigns
The
Mysterious Tenure of Robert Hight
By DAN BACHER
Robert Hight, Director of the California Department
of Fish and Game, sent his resignation letter to DFG staff last
week after accepting his appointment as a judge by Gray Davis.
His resignation--and tenure as DFG director--remain shrouded
in mystery and controversy.
This letter, his last, was the first
peep that was heard out of the Director in many, many months:
"Today is my last day serving as
Director of DFG. Sonke Mastrup will be acting Director until
further notice. I would like to personally thank you for all
your hard work and dedication in preserving California's wildlife
and natural resources. Working with you has been my pleasure.
We have faced many difficult challenges, and I have been repeatedly
impressed by your ability to rise to the occasion with great
zeal. I am proud to be able to tell others I have worked with
the greatest staff I have ever known.
Thank you again for all your hard work
and dedication. I am sure DFG will continue to move in a positive
direction. I hope our paths will cross again in the future. Best
of luck to each and everyone of you."
Everybody I spoke to was relieved to
hear of Hight's expected resignation--and glad that this dark
period of Fish and Game history was finally at an end. The appointment
of Sonke Mastrup as interim director was well received, particularly
since Mastrup actually has a background in wildlife management
and lots of experience working in the Department.
Everybody seems to have a different perception
of Hight, virtually all negative. Bob Simms, host of the KFBK
outdoor radio show, described Hight as the "Invisible Man"
for his adamant refusal to respond to phone calls from reporters
and the public and his total lack of accountability while in
office.
I believe Simms' description of Hight
as the "invisible man" was particularly apt, considering
the abysmal lack of direction the Department experienced under
his reign. Hight rarely made public appearances and was highly
unresponsive to appeals from anglers and the public on a variety
of fish and wildlife issues where immediate action was required.
Most notably, Hight was definitely the
"invisible man" when farmers in the Scott and Shasta
Valleys dried up the Scott and Shasta rivers in 2001, killing
thousands of juvenile steelhead and salmon. He was also definitely
the "invisible man" when PG&E refused to release
higher flows down Butte Creek, resulting in the largest kill
of threatened salmon in U.S. history, 12,000 to 15,000 adult
spring chinooks, this July and August.
Tom Stienstra, outdoor columnist for
the San Francisco Chronicle, last year compared Hight--and the
Governor who appointed him--to captains of shipwrecked craft.
"How many shipwrecks have occurred within close range of
the mouth of the Bay and Golden Gate?," Stienstra asked
in his annual outdoor quiz. "A. Five, including the recent
USS Davis and its support boat, the USS Hight, with all hands
lost."
However, some skeptics, including Jim
Martin and Ron Gaul, claim that the person described as Hight
was some sort of mythical entity that didn't exist--a nonexistent
person can't return phone calls or show up at meetings!
"The truth is that Robert Hight
was not just "invisible"--HE DOES NOT EXIST!,"
said Jim Martin, Anderson Valley Advertiser outdoor columnist
and Mendocino County's number one Bigfoot investigator. "Admit
it: There is more evidence for the existence of Bigfoot than
Bob Hight."
Martin challenged me to provide evidence
that there was such a creature as the mythical Robert Hight.
"I've attended many, many Fish and Game Commission meetings
and I never saw this person,'" he contended.
Martin added, "Maybe you can produce
some third party who will say that they saw him, somewhere, but
all I can say is, it's amazing what you can do with computers
these days. Somebody once showed me some grainy super-8 film
of a 'Bob Hight' running into the bushes, but it really looked
fake to me."
I told another skeptic, Ron Gaul, chairman
of the Committee Against the Hight Hoax (CAHH), that I remember
seeing a person supposed to be Hight, lurking in the shadows
at a Fish and Game Commission meeting in Sacramento. However,
Gaul claims that was a wax figure, labeled "Bob Hight, Director",
propped up at a few Commission meetings that Gaul attended. "I
was not fooled," he said.
I'm sorry, Ron, but the figure I saw
wasn't as solid as a wax figure, but was more of a phantom-like
entity. Matter of fact, I never saw him enter or leave the room--he
just "phased in and out" of existence!
This leads me to propose another theory--there
was an actual person named Robert Hight in the director's chair
during the first several years of the Davis regime. However,
he either passed away while in office or left the country.
This caused the Davis administration,
rather than appointing a new director, to create a holographic
image of Hight to appear at the few public functions where the
Director was supposedly present. That accounts for how the figure
I saw in the director's chair never spoke and was still as a
statue.
The mists of mystery will shroud the
Hight "directorship" of the Department of Fish and
Game for many years. Whether you consider Hight to have been
a real person, invisible man, shipwrecked captain, mythical entity
or high tech hologram, one thing is for certain.
Under Hight's tenure as director, NOBODY
WAS IN CHARGE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND GAME!
Note: if you have any eyewitness testimony,
photos, video or reliable sightings documenting Robert Hight's
existence and/or activities as Director of the Department of
Fish and Game, please contact me by email at danielbacher@hotmail.com.
Most journalists and investigators consider
the only film "documenting" Hight's existence, a grainy
super-8 film of a 'Bob Hight' running into the bushes, to be
a hoax.
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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