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Today's
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October
27, 2003
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
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
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
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October
27, 2003
One,
Two, Three...What Are They Fighting For?
Occupational
Schizophrenia
By ROBERT FISK
The
Independent
I was in the police station in the town of Fallujah
when I realised the extent of the schizophrenia. Captain Christopher
Cirino of the 82nd Airborne was trying to explain to me the nature
of the attacks so regularly carried out against American forces
in the Sunni Muslim Iraqi town. His men were billeted in a former
presidential rest home down the road--"Dreamland",
the Americans call it--but this was not the extent of his soldiers'
disorientation. "The men we are being attacked by,"
he said, "are Syrian-trained terrorists and local freedom
fighters." Come again? "Freedom fighters." But
that's what Captain Cirino called them--and rightly so.
Here's the reason. All American soldiers
are supposed to believe--indeed have to believe, along with their
President and his Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld--that Osama
bin Laden's "al-Qa'ida" guerrillas, pouring over Iraq's
borders from Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia (note how those close
allies and neighbours of Iraq, Kuwait and Turkey are always left
out of the equation), are assaulting United States forces as
part of the "war on terror". Special forces soldiers
are now being told by their officers that the "war on terror"
has been transferred from America to Iraq, as if in some miraculous
way, 11 September 2001 is now Iraq 2003. Note too how the Americans
always leave the Iraqis out of the culpability bracket--unless
they can be described as "Baath party remnants", "diehards"
or "deadenders" by the US proconsul, Paul Bremer.
Captain Cirino's problem, of course,
is that he knows part of the truth. Ordinary Iraqis--many of
them long-term enemies of Saddam Hussein--are attacking the American
occupation army 35 times a day in the Baghdad area alone. And
Captain Cirino works in Fallujah's local police station, where
America's newly hired Iraqi policemen are the brothers and uncles
and--no doubt--fathers of some of those now waging guerrilla
war against American soldiers in Fallujah. Some of them, I suspect,
are indeed themselves the "terrorists". So if he calls
the bad guys "terrorists", the local cops--his first
line of defence--would be very angry indeed.
No wonder morale is low. No wonder the
American soldiers I meet on the streets of Baghdad and other
Iraqi cities don't mince their words about their own government.
US troops have been given orders not to bad-mouth their President
or Secretary of Defence in front of Iraqis or reporters (who
have about the same status in the eyes of the occupation authorities).
But when I suggested to a group of US military police near Abu
Ghurayb they would be voting Republican at the next election,
they fell about laughing. "We shouldn't be here and we should
never have been sent here," one of them told me with astonishing
candour. "And maybe you can tell me: why were we sent here?"
Little wonder, then, that Stars and Stripes,
the American military's own newspaper, reported this month that
one third of the soldiers in Iraq suffered from low morale. And
is it any wonder, that being the case, that US forces in Iraq
are shooting down the innocent, kicking and brutalising prisoners,
trashing homes and--eyewitness testimony is coming from hundreds
of Iraqis--stealing money from houses they are raiding? No, this
is not Vietnam--where the Americans sometimes lost 3,000 men
in a month--nor is the US army in Iraq turning into a rabble.
Not yet. And they remain light years away from the butchery of
Saddam's henchmen. But human-rights monitors, civilian occupation
officials and journalists--not to mention Iraqis themselves--are
increasingly appalled at the behaviour of the American military
occupiers.
Iraqis who fail to see US military checkpoints,
who overtake convoys under attack--or who merely pass the scene
of an American raid--are being gunned down with abandon. US official
"inquiries" into these killings routinely result in
either silence or claims that the soldiers "obeyed their
rules of engagement"--rules that the Americans will not
disclose to the public.
The rot comes from the top. Even during
the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, US forces declined to take
responsibility for the innocents they killed. "We do not
do body counts," General Tommy Franks announced. So there
was no apology for the 16 civilians killed at Mansur when the
"Allies"--note how we Brits get caught up in this misleading
title--bombed a residential suburb in the vain hope of killing
Saddam. When US special forces raided a house in the very same
area four months later--hunting for the very same Iraqi leader--they
killed six civilians, including a 14-year-old boy and a middle-aged
woman, and only announced, four days later, that they would hold
an "inquiry". Not an investigation, you understand,
nothing that would suggest there was anything wrong in gunning
down six Iraqi civilians; and in due course the "inquiry"
was forgotten--as it was no doubt meant to be--and nothing has
been heard of it again.
Again, during the invasion, the Americans
dropped hundreds of cluster bombs on villages outside the town
of Hillah. They left behind a butcher's shop of chopped-up corpses.
Film of babies cut in half during the raid was not even transmitted
by the Reuters crew in Baghdad. The Pentagon then said there
were "no indications" cluster bombs had been dropped
at Hillah--even though Sky TV found some unexploded and brought
them back to Baghdad.
I first came across this absence of remorse--or
rather absence of responsibility--in a slum suburb of Baghdad
called Hayy al-Gailani. Two men had run a new American checkpoint--a
roll of barbed wire tossed across a road before dawn one morning
in July--and US troops had opened fire at the car. Indeed, they
fired so many bullets that the vehicle burst into flames. And
while the dead or dying men were burned inside, the Americans
who had set up the checkpoint simply boarded their armoured vehicles
and left the scene. They never even bothered to visit the hospital
mortuary to find out the identities of the men they killed--an
obvious step if they believed they had killed "terrorists"--and
inform their relatives. Scenes like this are being repeated across
Iraq daily.
Which is why Human Rights Watch and Amnesty
and other humanitarian organisations are protesting ever more
vigorously about the failure of the US army even to count the
numbers of Iraqi dead, let alone account for their own role in
killing civilians. "It is a tragedy that US soldiers have
killed so many civilians in Baghdad," Human Rights Watch's
Joe Stork said. "But it is really incredible that the US
military does not even count these deaths." Human Rights
Watch has counted 94 Iraqi civilians killed by Americans in the
capital. The organisation also criticised American forces for
humiliating prisoners, not least by their habit of placing their
feet on the heads of prisoners. Some American soldiers are now
being trained in Jordan--by Jordanians--in the "respect"
that should be accorded to Iraqi civilians and about the culture
of Islam. About time.
But on the ground in Iraq, Americans
have a licence to kill. Not a single soldier has been disciplined
for shooting civilians--even when the fatality involves an Iraqi
working for the occupation authorities. No action has been taken,
for instance, over the soldier who fired a single shot through
the window of an Italian diplomat's car, killing his translator,
in northern Iraq. Nor against the soldiers of the 82nd Airborne
who gunned down 14 Sunni Muslim protesters in Fallujah in April.
(Captain Cirino was not involved.) Nor against the troops who
shot dead 11 more protesters in Mosul. Sometimes, the evidence
of low morale mounts over a long period. In one Iraqi city, for
example, the "Coalition Provisional Authority"--which
is what the occupation authorities call themselves--have instructed
local money changers not to give dollars for Iraqi dinars to
occupation soldiers: too many Iraqi dinars had been stolen by
troops during house raids. Repeatedly, in Baghdad, Hillah, Tikrit,
Mosul and Fallujah Iraqis have told me that they were robbed
by American troops during raids and at checkpoints. Unless there
is a monumental conspiracy on a nationwide scale by Iraqis, some
of these reports must bear the stamp of truth.
Then there was the case of the Bengal
tiger. A group of US troops entered the Baghdad zoo one evening
for a party of sandwiches and beer. During the party, one of
the soldiers decided to pet the tiger who--being a Bengal tiger--sank
his teeth into the soldier. The Americans then shot the tiger
dead. The Americans promised an "inquiry"--of which
nothing has been heard since. Ironically, the one incident where
US forces faced disciplinary action followed an incident in which
a US helicopter crew took a black religious flag from a communications
tower in Sadr City in Baghdad. The violence that followed cost
the life of an Iraqi civilian.
Suicides among US troops in Iraq have
risen in recent months--up to three times the usual rate among
American servicemen. At least 23 soldiers are believed to have
taken their lives since the Anglo-American invasion and others
have been wounded in attempting suicide. As usual, the US army
only revealed this statistic following constant questioning.
The daily attacks on Americans outside Baghdad--up to 50 in a
night--go, like the civilian Iraqi dead, unrecorded. Travelling
back from Fallujah to Baghdad after dark last month, I saw mortar
explosions and tracer fire around 13 American bases--not a word
of which was later revealed by the occupation authorities. At
Baghdad airport last month, five mortar shells fell near the
runway as a Jordanian airliner was boarding passengers for Amman.
I saw this attack with my own eyes. That same afternoon, General
Ricardo Sanchez, the senior US officer in Iraq, claimed he knew
nothing about the attack, which--unless his junior officers are
slovenly--he must have been well aware of.
But can we expect anything else of an
army that can wilfully mislead soldiers into writing "letters"
to their home town papers in the US about improvements in Iraqi
daily life.
"The quality of life and security
for the citizens has been largely restored, and we are a large
part of why it has happened," Sergeant Christopher Shelton
of the 503rd Airborne Infantry Regiment bragged in a letter from
Kirkuk to the Snohomish County Tribune. "The majority of
the city has welcomed our presence with open arms." Only
it hasn't. And Sergeant Shelton didn't write the letter. Nor
did Sergeant Shawn Grueser of West Virginia. Nor did Private
Nick Deaconson. Nor eight other soldiers who supposedly wrote
identical letters to their local papers. The "letters"
were distributed among soldiers, who were asked to sign if they
agreed with its contents.
But is this, perhaps, not part of the
fantasy world inspired by the right-wing ideologues in Washington
who sought this war--even though most of them have never served
their country in uniform. They dreamed up the "weapons of
mass destruction" and the adulation of American troops who
would "liberate" the Iraqi people. Unable to provide
fact to fiction, they now merely acknowledge that the soldiers
they have sent into the biggest rat's nest in the Middle East
have "a lot of work to do", that they are--this was
not revealed before or during the invasion--"fighting the
front line in the war on terror".
What influence, one might ask, have the
Christian fundamentalists had on the American army in Iraq? For
even if we ignore the Rev Franklin Graham, who has described
Islam as "a very evil and wicked religion" before he
went to lecture Pentagon officials--what is one to make of the
officer responsible for tracking down Osama bin Laden, Lieutenant-General
William "Jerry" Boykin, who told an audience in Oregon
that Islamists hate the US "because we're a Christian nation,
because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian and
the enemy is a guy called Satan". Recently promoted to deputy
under-secretary of defence for intelligence, Boykin went on to
say of the war against Mohammed Farrah Aidid in Somalia--in which
he participated--that "I knew my God was bigger than his--I
knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol".
Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld
said of these extraordinary remarks that "it doesn't look
like any rules were broken". We are now told that an "inquiry"
into Boykin's comments is underway--an "inquiry" about
as thorough, no doubt, as those held into the killing of civilians
in Baghdad.
Weaned on this kind of nonsense, however,
is it any surprise that American troops in Iraq understand neither
their war nor the people whose country they are occupying? Terrorists
or freedom fighters? What's the difference?
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 Oct. 18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
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