Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
19, 2003
Ilan Pappe
The
Hole in the Road Map
Bill Glahn
RIAA is Full of Bunk, So is the New York Times
Dave Lindorff
General Hysteria: the Clark Bandwagon
Robert Fisk
New Guard is Saddam's Old
Jeff Halper
Preparing
for a Struggle Against Israeli Apartheid
Brian J. Foley
Power to the Purse
Clare
Brandabur
Hitchens
Smears Edward Said
Website of the Day
Live from Palestine
September
18, 2003
Mona Baker
and Lawrence Davidson
In
Defense of the Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions
Wayne
Madsen
Wesley
Clark for President? Another Neo-Con Con Job
Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Wesley Clark and Waco
Muqtedar Khan
The Pakistan Squeeze
Dominique
de Villepin
The
Reconstruction of Iraq: This Approach is Leading Nowhere
Angus Wright
Brazilian Land Reform Offers Hope
Elaine
Cassel
Payback is Hell
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Website
of the Day
ALA Responds to Ashcroft's Smear
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
20, 2003
Uribe's Desperate
Squeals
When
Terrorists Talk of Human Rights
By JUSTIN PODUR
On September 8, Colombian President Alvaro Uribe
Velez said "when terrorists start feeling weak, they immediately
send their spokesmen to talk about human rights." He said
while some human rights groups were "respectable",
others were "political agitators in the service of terrorism,
cowards who wrap themselves in the banner of human rights, in
order to win back for Colombian terrorism the space which the
armed forces and the public have taken from it."
Why was Uribe annoyed enough at human
rights organizations to try to demonize them as 'terrorists'?
The human rights organizations had been very busy in the weeks
leading up to Uribe's speech, in no small part due to the activities
of Uribe's government and army. A small sample:
One noted human rights organization,
CREDHOS (Corporacion Regional para la Defensa de los Derechos
Humanos) reported that the paramilitaries disappeared 6 men and
a woman in Barrancabermeja. Like Uribe, the paramilitaries in
that city demonized and threatened 15 others, accusing them of
being guerrillas. Colombia's food and beverages union, SINALTRAINAL,
reported an attempt on the life of its vice president on August
22, 2003 by a motorcycle gunman. Youth organizations reported
a paramilitary massacre of five youths in Cundinamarca. Other
human rights organizations reported two murders that occurred
on August 1 (during skirmishes between the army, paramilitaries,
and guerrillas), another on August 9 in El Castillo county (by
the Army), two more, one on August 11 and another on the 12 in
Villavivencio (by the paramilitaries). The United Nations reported
on August 8 that 118 indigenous had been murdered in Colombia
so far in 2003. Unions reported that 50 unionists were killed
in the same period. The Colombian Commission of Jurists reported
some 7,000 political assassinations in the past year. They criticized
the government's agrarian policy, its authoritarianism, and its
regressive social policies.
In Cali, the paramilitaries threatened
the Social and Political Front, a group consisting of unions,
social organizations, and human rights groups, calling for a
war against them.
Uribe's government is in peace negotiations
with these paramilitaries. And so, while trying to bring the
paramilitaries back to legality and respectability, the government
has been doing its best to make human rights work not only life-threatening,
but illegal as well. In other words Uribe has been making good
on the threat implicit in his speech.
Since Uribe came into office in August
2002, 2400 people have been 'processed' by the justice system
for their social, political, or human rights activities. One
example of such 'processing' is what happened to 156 people in
Chalan, Coloso, and Onejas on August 17 or to 42 social leaders
in Arauca, who were arrested en masse in house raids on August
20. Similar mass detentions happened on August 24 in Tolima (54
people, including a parish priest). The police and army were
detaining campesinos, who were protesting for the right to education,
in Popayan in Cauca on September 8.
On September 6, a church-based human
rights group called Justicia y Paz demanded that the government
open up the files it has been collecting on it and denounced
the harrassment its members have been facing, accused of collaboration
with the guerrillas.
The increasingly open, official attacks
on social organizations are supplementing the older strategy
of dirty war, where paramilitaries were used to do the same work
while the government denied responsibility. Uribe's strategy
is to bring the war out into the open: to declare social organizations
illegal and use the army and police against them directly, while
making the paramilitaries legal and holding 'negotiations' with
them.
Both strategies are based on conflating
social opposition, social movements, and human rights defenders
with the guerrilla insurgency. But Colombia's guerrillas are
all too often as uninterested in human rights as its government
and paramilitaries. The Black People's Processes, an Afro-Colombian
organization, reported that on August 28, peasant leader Teodolindo
Rivas Mena was killed in Medio Atrato by the 57th front of the
FARC. On August 31, Jose Luciano Castillo Alegria, an Afro-Colombian
leader from Narino was assassinated by the 29th front of the
FARC. It seems that no armed actor in Colombia's war respects
the lives of civilians and social leaders.
But Uribe's tirade was not motivated
by tears for peasant leaders from the Pacific Coast. It might
instead have been pitched to his backers in the United States.
Uribe's economic policies have devastated the country. He has
thrown tens of thousands out of work, broken unions, privatized
public services, continued to fumigate peasants, and given Colombians
nothing in return but violence, death, and empty rhetoric about
'terrorism'. Terror wars are expensive. The United States is
Uribe's only hope for the money to pay for this war. But the
US is in an economic recession itself, and is sinking tens of
billions into occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine.
Uribe's attack on the human rights organizations fits nicely
with the American Enterprise Institute's (the Bush Administration's
favorite think-tank) recent railing against non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) as antidemocratic bodies (would AEI criticize
the NGOs of the Venezuelan opposition as antidemocratic, one
wonders?). Repackaging an old product with fresh lingo is an
old advertising trick.
And for all the US's expenditures on
other wars and occupations, it will come up with the money. Washington's
price is immunity: the announcement that military aid funds would
continue was made just after Washington and Bogota signed a bilateral
deal exempting Americans from prosecution by the UN's international
war crimes court. Between these exemptions and the paramilitary
'peace negotiations', Colombia is becoming a model place for
officials to commit war crimes and be immune from the consequences.
But years from now, Uribe, the Colombian
military, and paramilitaries, may find that their careful efforts
to ensure their immunity won't enable them to hide. The Peruvian
Truth and Reconciliation Commission published its report at the
beginning of September. It named names and fingered members of
governments and occupiers of high military posts as being criminally
responsible in that country's vicious counterinsurgency war of
the 1980s. Pinochet might have escaped justice, but the attempt
to try him reduced some of his arrogance. The Argentine generals
who ruled from 1976-1983 spend time worrying about prosecution.
Perhaps those who have unleashed state and paramilitary terror
on Colombians should worry about that, too, when they talk so
disparagingly about human rights.
Justin Podur
is a frequent writer and translator on Colombia and Latin America.
He can be reached at justin.podur@utoronto.ca
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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