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Today's
Stories
January 17 / 18, 2003
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
January 12, 2004
Ben Tripp
No Stan
for the Kurds
Norman Solomon
The
Dixie Trap: Democrats and the South
Mike Whitney
O'Neill's Revenge
Jason Leopold
From the Very First Instant It Was About Iraq
Uri Avnery
Syria's
Peace Proposal
January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
January 9, 2004
David Lindorff
The
Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses
Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's
Non-existent WMDs
Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail
Lenni Brenner
Dr.
Dean and the Godhead
Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium
Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad
January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
Uncharitable
Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads
Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A Record
to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the
Cuban Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red Alert
2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
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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Weekend
Edition
January 31 / February 1, 2004
Holding Bush Accountable
The
Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
By KURT NIMMO
Like the main character in Christopher Nolan's
noir film Memento, members of the House and Senate intelligence
committees seem to have lost their short-term memory.
They can't remember who exactly pedaled
Bush's lies about Saddam's illusory weapons of mass destruction.
They recall Iraq had WMD at one time,
although they say nothing about who provided those weapons (the
US government did).
Looking around for scapegoats to cover
Bush's calculated lies, or rather the calculated lies of his
neocon advisors -- Bush only repeats what these advisors tell
him -- members of the intelligence committees are determined
to blame the CIA for "bad intelligence," for the absurd
contrivances repeated by the president.
It wasn't the CIA who twisted the truth
into a pretzel.
The CIA is guilty of many crimes, but
distorting the truth on Saddam, at least in regard to his WMD,
is not one of them. The CIA told the Bushites back in 2002 before
Bush invaded Iraq that the "intelligence" provided
by untrustworthy Iraqi exiles  was garbage, and
yet the neocons took said garbage and sold it to the American
people as evidence of Saddam's wickedness.
In fact, the Bushites waged war against
the entire expert Middle East establishment -- including the
State Department, CIA and Pentagon area specialists -- because
they were not telling them what they wanted to hear.
"Inside the foreign-policy, defense
and intelligence agencies, nearly the whole rank and file, along
with many senior officials, are opposed to invading Iraq,"
Richard Dreyfuss of the American Prospect wrote at the time.
"But because the less than two dozen neoconservatives leading
the war party have the support of Vice President Dick Cheney
and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, they are able to marginalize
that opposition."
"What we have is evidence that there
are differences between what we knew going in and what we found
on the ground," national security adviser Condoleezza Rice
told the Washington Post after CIA former weapons inspector David
Kay admitted Saddam had no scary WMD.
Rice, of course, is playing footsie.
What Bush and the neocons "knew"
was customized by a coterie of Straussian neocons who perpetuate
"noble lies," who believe in the "efficacy and
usefulness of lies in politics," as Shadia Drury terms it.
The neocons lied, big time, the Senate and House intelligence
committees know it, but nobody wants to level with the American
people.
Instead, the Republicans want to whitewash
the whole thing into oblivion, especially now that Bush is gearing
up for his re-election.
Here's what the House and Senate intelligence
committees refuse to consider, muddled in their short term memory
loss for the sake of political expediency: the so-called "bad
intelligence" customized for Bush came from "a shadow
agency of Pentagon analysts staffed mainly by ideological amateurs
to compete with the CIA and its military counterpart, the Defense
Intelligence Agency," as Julian Borger of the Guardian described
it last summer. "The agency, called the Office of Special
Plans (OSP), was set up by the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld,
to second-guess CIA information and operated under the patronage
of hard-line conservatives in the top rungs of the administration,
the Pentagon and at the White House, including Vice-President
Dick Cheney."
In other words, the OSP was a factory
cranking out lies.
As Hitler knew, the big lie contains
a "certain force of credibility... because the broad masses
of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata
of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily, and
thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily
fall victims to the big lie than the small lie."
For instance, it was more effective to
repeat over and over that Saddam was an evil dictator with a
huge stockpile of ghastly WMD that he would use unremorsefully
against innocent Americans -- maybe tomorrow, maybe next week,
certainly sooner before later -- and the only credible, rational,
moral response was to take him out. The "emotional nature"
of this lie overwhelmed any logical response. Evidence need not
be provided, only the threat repeated ad nauseam.
The OSP operates subversively; it pedals
insidious and emotionally charged lies to the corporate media.
For example, the OSP told the NSC in
2002 that Saddam was attempting to buy aluminum tubes for a reconstituted
nuclear program. In September of 2002, the OSP leaked this contrived
"intelligence" to the New York Times. Once published
in the New York Times, Bush and Condi Rice made reference to
it, regardless of the fact anybody who knows anything about nuclear
science said it was nonsense.
Same thing with al-Qaeda.
The CIA was unable to establish a link
between Saddam and Osama, even with Cheney and Newt Gingrich
breathing down their necks. No problem. Send in the neocon Douglas
Feith, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy for Rumsfeld's Pentagon.
Feith and the OSP went to work establishing implausible links
between Saddam and al-Qaeda by re-laundering existing intelligence
information.
In late 2002, as the Bushites were gearing
up to invade Iraq, Rumsfeld told a compliant media he had "bulletproof"
evidence Iraq was sheltering al-Qaeda terrorists. But according
to experts it was highly unlikely the secular dictator Saddam
would harbor Muslim fanatics, especially considering the violent
animosity between Ba'athists and the Shi'ites in Iraq. It just
did not make sense, but never mind.
Now, thanks to this fallacious nonsense
and the corporate media's willingness to repeat it as if demonstrated
fact, an overwhelming number of Americans believe Saddam had
something to do with 9/11. There is absolutely no evidence, but
then none is required when dealing with the "emotional nature"
of the American public.
Big lies worked big time for Hitler,
and now they work big time for Hitler's understudies, the Straussian
neocons.
In order to convince the American people
Iraq deserved to be invaded and a whole lot of people slaughtered,
the OSP simply performed a bit of rudimentary editorial work
on existing CIA documents. Words such as "likely,"
"probably," and "may" were excised, and then
the reports were fed to Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, and others in the
administration.
If wholly fabricated "intelligence"
was required, the OSP relied on criminal organizations, such
as the Iraq National Congress, or called on right-wingers in
Sharon's Israeli government to provide bogeyman scenarios.
Now, as the House and Senate looks into
the "intelligence failures" that allowed Bush to invade
a defenseless and impoverished nation, there is no mention of
the OSP, of the neocons or their treachery.
Instead, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the chairman
on the Senate Intelligence committee, has characterized Bush's
purposed Iraq lies as "a world intelligence failure,"
spreading the blame around, obscuring the real source of Bush's
lies.
Charles A. Duelfer, David Kay's successor,
and Maj. Gen. Keith W. Dayton, commander of the Iraq Survey Group,
will present an interim report in late March "to show the
public that every possible step has been taken to find the truth"
concerning Iraq's illusory WMD, according to the Washington Post.
David Kay went to Iraq and wasted millions
of dollars looking for WMD the OSP said existed, even as those
familiar with Iraq and UNSCOM's destruction of weapons insisted
otherwise.
"The people of the United States
are still waiting for a heavily divided Congress to break free
of partisan politics and launch a genuine investigation,"
said former UNSCOM weapons inspector Scott Ritter earlier this
month. "This should certainly look at the massive intelligence
failure surrounding the gross distortion of the Iraqi WMD threat
put forward by the US intelligence community. But perhaps more
importantly, the investigation should focus on the actions of
the White House in shaping the intelligence estimates so that
they dovetailed nicely with the political goals and objectives
of the Bush administration's Iraq policy-makers."
Objectives and policy goals put forward
for nearly a decade now by the Straussian neocons currently drive
US foreign policy.
If Bush wins the election, we can expect
more OSP lies and fabrications engineered in preparation for
invasions of Syria, Iran, and possibly Saudi Arabia, North Korea,
and beyond (see "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing
the Realm," a policy paper written by an array of neocon
warmongers in 1996 for then Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu).
Before the election, an independent investigation
into the OSP's bogus intelligence is in order.
Last year Representative Henry Waxman
of California introduced HR 2625 in the House, a bill designed
to set up just such an investigative body. As of late January,
the bill had 138 co-sponsors, all Democrats with the exception
of one Independent.
Is it possible the Democrats have finally
grown a spine?
Maybe, may be not.
In November, in an effort to head off
a move toward an independent investigation, Senate Republicans
accused the Democrats of attempting to damage Bush politically
in an election year and derail a Senate bi-partisan investigation
currently underway.
"Some Democrat leaders are flirting
with treason while the Republicans are acting like a bunch of
sissies," complained an unnamed "top figure" from
the so-called national-security community.
In other words, merely calling for an
independent investigation is a form of treason, an effort to
"destroy the nation's wartime Republican president,"
as J. Michael Waller characterized it last December in Insight
magazine. How best to deal with seditious Democrats? "Lincoln's
policy was to have treasonous federal lawmakers arrested and
tried before military tribunals, and exiled or hanged if convicted,"
Waller explained.
No doubt it is a solution Bush and the
neocons can live with.
If Bush is not called to answer for his
lies before the election, then he will never be called to answer.
If he wins re-election, the neocons will continue their plans
to invade in piecemeal fashion the whole of the Arab Middles
East.
OSP will become a permanent fixture.
So will murderous lies.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html
. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's,
The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays
for CounterPunch, Another
Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Weekend
Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
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