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Today's Stories

November 29 / 30, 2003

Standard Schaefer
Unions are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes

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

 

November 14 / 23, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Clintontime: Was It Really a Golden Age?

Saul Landau
Words of War

Noam Chomsky
Invasion as Marketing Problem: Iraq War and Contempt for Democracy

Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl

John Holt
Blue Light: Battle for the Sweetgrass Hills

Adam Engel
A DC Lefty in King George's Court: an Interview with Sam Smith

Joanne Mariner
In a Dark Hole: Moussaoui and the Hidden Detainees

Uri Avnery
The General as Pseudo-Dove: Ya'alon's 70 Virgins

M. Shahid Alam
Voiding the Palestinians: an Allegory

Juliana Fredman
Visions of Concrete

Norman Solomon
Media Clash in Brazil

Brian Cloughley
Is Anyone in the Bush Administration Telling the Truth?

William S. Lind
Post-Machine Gun Tactics

Patrick W. Gavin
Imagine

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Brand of Leadership: Putting Himself First

Tom Crumpacker
Pandering to Anti-Castro Hardliners

Erik Fleming
Howard Dean's Folly

Rick Giombetti
Challenging the Witch Doctors of the New Imperialism: a Review of Bush in Babylon

Jorge Mariscal
Las Adelitas, 2003: Mexican-American Women in Iraq

Chris Floyd
Logical Conclusions

Mickey Z.
Does William Safire Need Mental Help?

David Vest
Owed to the Confederate Dead

Ron Jacobs
Joe: the Sixties Most Unforgiving Film

Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors

Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam

 

 

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

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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
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It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East

Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't

 

 

 

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Weekend Edition
November 29 / 30, 2003

The Great Cover-up

Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

By MITCHEL COHEN

I'm not a big Charlie Rose fan. But last Monday night's interview on PBS with Gary Wills on his new book, "Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Houghton Mifflin)," was one of the most fascinating I'd ever heard. Wills is re-examining early US history. His analysis of racism and Thomas Jefferson sheds entirely new light, for me, on such questions as why a slave is portrayed as 3/5ths of a person in the US Constitution.

Usually this stinging racist issue is cast in moral terms: Because the slaveowners viewed their slaves as less than human, we are taught, they were opposed to having any mention of slaves as people in the Constitution; Northern anti-slavery advocates wanted to include slaves among the free people.

Not so!, says Wills, who argues that it was the North and northern capitalists who were insisting that Slaves not be counted as persons in the Constitution, and it was the South (and the slavocracy) that insisted that slaves must be counted as full people!

What a reversal of what we've all been taught! Wills is not arguing that this curious reversal of positions occurred out of the goodness of anybody's heart. NONE of the framers, for instance, argued for Constitutional clauses guaranteeing voting rights to slaves, women, or the poor--that vast majority of the people. No, Wills lays out the real reason: Power. By counting slaves as full people, the slaveowners would get to cast votes on behalf of the number of people they "represented." If one counts slaves in that equation, the southern slave owners would have an indefeatable majority. Thus the 3/5ths clause in the Constitution was indeed a means to protect and extend the institution of slavery -- but with the proponents of slavery advocating for a full counting of slaves as people, in order to advance their grip on the levers of power.

Although he was in France during the negotiations over the Constitution, Jefferson--who had been in the thick of discussions of this issue for years -- again made his views known, from afar, in letters to James Madison and to others. These views were not those of a believer in real democracy, but of a strong proponent of slavery. Indeed, Wills argues, it was the 3/5ths weighted vote of the southern slaveowners that propelled and maintained Jefferson--and the South -- into control of the US government. As John Quincy Adams remarked, "The election of Mr. Jefferson to the presidency was, upon sectional feelings, the triumph of the South over the North -- of the slave representation over the purely free."

Wills reviews much of this in a recent article: "Though everyone recognizes that Jefferson depended on slaves for his economic existence, fewer reflect that he depended on them for his political existence. Yet the latter was the all-important guardian of the former. Like other Southerners, Jefferson felt he had to take every political step he could to prevent challenges to the slave system. That is why Southerners made sure that slavery was embedded in the very legislative process of the nation, as it was created by the Constitution -- they made the three-fifths "representation" of slaves in the national legislature a nonnegotiable condition for their joining the Union." (New York Review of Books, Nov. 6, 2003)

At least twelve of Jefferson's electoral votes in the presidential elections of 1800 "were not based on the citizenry that could express its will but on the blacks owned by Southern masters," Wills writes. "A bargain had been struck at the Constitutional Convention -- one of the famous compromises on which the document was formed, this one intended to secure ratification in the South. The negotiated agreement, as I have said, decreed that each slave held in the United States would count as three fifths of a person in setting the members of the Electoral College."

Wills points out that "Though the election of 1800 is one of the most thoroughly studied events in our history, few treatments of it even mention the fact that Jefferson won it by the slave count." He asks: "Why is the impact of the federal ratio so little known?"

In his article in New York Review of Books, Wills goes through several surveys of the literature to analyze this 'federal ratio.' "Without the federal ratio as the deciding factor in House votes, slavery would have been excluded from Missouri; Andrew Jackson's policy of removing Indians from territories they occupied in several states would have failed; the 1840 gag rule, protecting slavery in the District of Columbia, would not have been imposed; the Wilmot Proviso would have banned slavery from territories won from Mexico. Moreover, the Kansas and Nebraska bill outlawing slavery in Nebraska territory and allowing it in Kansas would have failed. Other votes were close enough to give opposition to the South a better chance, if the federal ratio had not been counted into the calculations from the outset. Elections to key congressional posts were affected continually by the federal ratio, with the result that Southerners held 'the Speaker's office for 79 percent of the time [before 1824], Ways and Means for 92 percent.'

"The historian Leonard Richards shows another pervasive influence of the three-fifths clause. Even when it did not affect the outcome of congressional votes, it dominated Democratic caucus and convention votes, since the South had a larger majority there than in the larger body. This meant that it guaranteed presidential nominations that would be friendly to the slave interest. When control of the caucus seemed to be slipping from Southern hands, a two-thirds requirement for nominating candidates gave them the power to veto men unacceptable to them. The federal ratio was, therefore, just the starting point for seizing and solidifying positions of influence in the government. It was a force supplemented by other maneuvers. It gave the South a permanent head start for all its political activities."

Gary Wills, who has written other books and articles admiring Jefferson, is nevertheless relentless here in holding Jefferson responsible for the consolidation of the slavocracy's hold on the reins of the federal government. He points out that even those who opposed the trans-Atlantic slave trade were not against chattel slavery per se, but mostly desirous of selling the offspring of their own slaves into the new western territories opened up by the Louisiana Purchase, without competition from abroad.

Similar opportunistic arguments against the trans-Atlantic slave trade developed in France around the time of the revolution in Haiti, which culminated in Toussaint's coming to power in 1803, as documented in detail in "The Black Jacobins" by CLR James. These legislators purportedly opposed slavery on philosophical grounds, but in actuality many became opponents of slavery in competition with England for colonies and trade.

The slaveowners weighted vote was responsible for the fact that "ten of the pre-Civil War presidents were slave owners themselves, and two of the postwar presidents had owned slaves earlier -- Johnson and Grant. That means that over a quarter of the presidents in our history were slaveholders," Wills writes. "Even those who were not Southerners had to temporize with the South. Northerners or westerners like Van Buren, Tyler, Polk, Clay, and Buchanan helped draft the gag laws protecting slavery in the District. Tyler added a slave Texas, and Polk waged the war for slave territory taken from Mexico. It was a Northerner who constructed the North-South alliance that protected slavery for decades. In the words of Leonard Richards: 'Many scholars have long suspected that Van Buren and his colleagues purposely fashioned the Jackson coalition so that it protected slavery and southern interests.' Buchanan worked behind the scenes to keep Dred Scott a slave. Even John Quincy Adams had to settle for a Southern cabinet, led by the slaveholding Clay, to deal with a Jacksonian Congress."

There's a lot more to Wills' argument. He concludes: The silence over the truth about Jefferson and slavery "has defended the Confederate battle flag as untainted by slavery. And it has kept the image of Jefferson relatively unclouded by the things he did to promote and protect and expand the slave power."

Despite the philosophical virtues of Jeffersonian democracy prized by Greens and other activists today (such as the romanticization of early American agrarian culture) -- Jeffersonian democracy often gets counterposed to Marxist analysis of capitalism within our activist circles -- the over-arching historical significance of racial slavery in Jefferson's framework, his role in protecting and promoting it and its legacy shape much of what we're facing today: The reason why agricultural workers and restaurant workers are not afforded the right to unionize under the National Labor Relations Act; the collaboration of the Democratic Party in voting for and passing the USA Patriot Act, NAFTA/GATT/WTO; the mass transference of wealth from the working class and the poor to the corporate execs and millionaires -- all have their roots in the collaboration of the so-called liberal North with the southern slavocracy defended by Jefferson.

Meanwhile, the installation of huge prisons in sparsely populated rural areas today serves a similar function as the 3/5ths weighted vote served for the first hundred years of this country's existence. Annelle Williams points out that "though it has not been talked about, a similar issue of 'counting slaves' is central to the re-districting issue in Texas. The 13th Amendment did not do away with with slavery but only transferred the right to own/hold slaves from private citizens to the State. Prison labor is 'outsourced' in more than 33 states, the vast majority without pay and if pay is involved, like California, it is minuscule. Prisons in Texas have been built in rural, and in many instances Republican areas. They have brought industry jobs to the people (prisons support many layers of these cities/counties). For census purposes, prisoners are counted in the cities/counties in which they are incarcerated not the cities where they are from. Similarly, they can not vote or have their views expressed or represented by themselves. Prisoners are being counted to impact federal and state funding to areas, redesign districts, thereby impacting electoral politics for the state legislatures and congressional representatives. There is not a provision in the Constittution for a reduction by percentage in representation, etc. for those who cannot vote and have been convicted of a crime. With the large and ever-increasing numbers of persons being incarcerated, we not only have prison labor as slave labor, but also the alarming prisonization of Americans, with prisoners being counted without represenation. The long range implications of political, social, and economic, cultural viability of Black and Brown communities is cause for concern," increasing the power of the legislators from those areas against the will of those behind the walls of the modern-day plantation, who are counted nevertheless as one basis for their representation.

There are many terrific things about Jefferson, much in his vision of real democracy that can be useful today. But ... BUT (!!!) ... Gary Wills' takedown of the great man on the question of slavery and his role in promoting it (and the need for 2 centuries of cover-ups about it) is bracing, to say the least. It's no wonder we're not taught any of that in school, for we might then develop alternative frameworks for transforming society at its very roots.

Mitchel Cohen is the co-editor of Green Politix, the national newspaper of the Greens/Green Party USA. He organizes with the Brooklyn Greens, and with the No Spray Coalition. He can be reached at: mitchelcohen@mindspring.com

Weekend Edition Features for Nov. 14 / 23, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
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Saul Landau
Words of War

Noam Chomsky
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Stan Goff
An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq: Hold on to Your Humanity

Jeffrey St. Clair
Bush Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl

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Joanne Mariner
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Norman Solomon
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Erik Fleming
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Rick Giombetti
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David Vest
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Dave Zirin
Foreman and Carlos: a Tale of Two Survivors

Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert, Greeder, Ghalib and Alam

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