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Today's
Stories
March 8, 2004
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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March 5, 2004
Chris Floyd
Uncle
Sugar: How the WMD Scam Put Money in Bush Family Pockets
Ron Jacobs
Chaos
Reigns: Haiti and Iraq
Lisa Viscidi
Guatemalan
Refugees: a Difficult Return
Yves Engler
Canada and the Coup in Haiti
Mike Legro
Those Bush Ads: Some Dead Bodies Are Worth More Than Others
Javier Armas
A Night of Inspiration: Oakland Benefit for Grocery Workers Strike
Bennett Hoffman
"Who Cares About Haiti, Anyway?"
Bill Christison
Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous
Website of the Day
Haiti Support Group
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March 4, 2004
Diane Christian
Sex
and Ideals
Sen. Robert Byrd
Stop the Stonewalling, Mr. President: Fairy Tales, Bush and the
9/11 Commission
Norman Solomon
Assuming the Right to Intervene: The US Press and Haiti
Jack Brown
A Fragrant Saga of Mexico's Greens
Hal Cranmer
The
John Kerry Experience
David Lindorff
Greenspan's Pension
Sam Smith
The Election is Over, We Lost
Christopher Brauchli
Goin'
to the Chapel: The Gay and the Dead
Brian D. Barry
The "Perfect" World of E-Voting: A Computer Scientist
Reports from the Polling Booth
Richard Oxman
Arsonists for Haiti?
Peter Phillips
Haitian
Fantasies: Mainstream Media Fails Itself, Again
Tariq Ali
Notes on Anti-Semitism, Zionism and
Palestine
Website of the Day
What If Boeing Ads Told the Truth?
March 3, 2004
Heather Williams / Karl
Laraque
Marines
Retake Haiti
Jack McCarthy
Guy's
Our Guy: "I am the Chief. My Hero is Pinochet."
Robert Sandels
The
Purloined Label: The Struggle Over the Havana Club Trademark
Juliana Fredman / James Davis
Israeli Organized Crime
JG
The Yuppie Silence on Haiti
Emilio Sardi
The
Colombia/US Free Trade Deal: It's About More Than Trade
Alan Farago
Swimming in Sewage
Mike Whitney
"Blood
Will Have Blood": 143 Murdered in Liberated Iraq
CounterPunch Wire
Nader's Legislative Record in the 1960s
Steve Perry
Kerry
Advisory: Remember Lena Guerrero
Nelson George/ Marcus Miller
Miles Davis & Hip Hop: a Conversation
Website of the Day
$10,000 Is Yours for the Taking: The USS Liberty Challenge
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March 2, 2004
William Blum
If Kerry's
the Answer, What's the Question?
Conn Hallinan
Haiti:
the Dangerous Muddle
JoAnn Wypijewski
The Bravo
H-Bomb Test: One WMD They Couldn't Hide
Mike Whitney
Regime Change in Haiti: the Bush Dominos Keep Falling
Ra Ravishankar
Afghanistan, the Liberation That Isn't: an Interview with Mariam
from RAWA
Dan Bacher
Merle Haggard & the Politics of Salmon: "Clearcutting
is Rape"
Greg Moses
Oscar White
Brandy Baker
Mel Gibson's Minstrelsy Show
Little Tucker Carlson
What I Did on My Vacation
Robert Fisk
All This
Talk of Civil War, Now This
Merle Haggard
Kern River
Website of the Day
Rebel Edit
March 1, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Morris
Thanks War Criminal in Front of Billions
Richard Oxman
Oscar's
Obit: Thanking Bob McNamara
Elaine Cassel
Writing and Reading as "Terrorism"
Mickey Z
Thomas Friedman's Education
Mike Whitney
George Will and Anti-Semitism: a Cul-de-Sac of Prejudice
Heather Williams
Haiti
as Target Practice: How the US Press Missed the Story
Cathy Crosson
Chanson d'amour haïtienne
Website of the Day
God Hates Shrimp
February 28 / 29, 2004
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Team
Gary Leupp
Another Senseless Bush Battle: Defining and Protecting Marriage
William A. Cook
Israel:
America's Albatross
Ron Jacobs
Kucinich: Good Fight; Wrong Battlefield
Ben Tripp
A Nosegay of Posies: Queer Weddings at Last!
Leilla Matsui
Dances with Crucifixes
Mike Whitney
Dismantle
the Military Goliath
Yoel Marcus
Down and Out in the Hague
Uri Avnery
The Dancing Bear
Linda S. Heard
Britons and Americans Condemned to a Hobson's Choice
Al Krebs
Unmasking a Secret American Empire: Land, Water & Cotton
Stan Cox
Life (Pat. Pend.): Genetic Commandeering
JG
The Haiti Boomerang: "After The Looting & Pillaging,
Your Hunger Will Remain"
Rick Giombetti
Censorship at the Seattle P-I on Forced Psychiatry
Keith Hoeller
The Bankruptcy of Mental Health Insurance Parity
Dave Zirin
Colorado Football: Buffalo Swill
NADERAMA
Alan Maass
Nader and the Politics of Lesser
Evils
Michael Donnelly
Regime
Rotation: Anybody But Bush...Again?
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Exeunt Serenaders; Enter Nader
Doug Giebel
So Nader's Running? Get Over It
Bruce Jackson
An Open Letter to Naderites
CounterPunch Wire
Stalinists for Kerry! and Other Roars from the Crowd
Poets' Basement
Davies, Scarr, Kearney & Albert
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February 27, 2004
Thomas C. Mountain
A
White Jesus During Black History Month?
Laura Carlsen
Americans
Abroad: Bush is Persona Non Grata
John B. Anderson
Nader's Campaign Brings Back Memories: Creating an Open Electoral
Process
Jason Leopold
Spying
on Kofi Annan
John Chuckman
Nader,
Risk and Hope
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Putin's Russia
Ray McGovern
Punished
for Honest Intelligence
Saul Landau
The
Haiti Redux
Website of the Day
Bush: Why I'm Running for Re-election
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February 26, 2004
Brandy Baker
Is Nader
on to Something?
Jacques Kinau
AEI
to Colombia: "Can't Give You Anything But Guns, Baby"
Norman Solomon
Bugging Kofi Annan: UN Spying
and the Evasions of US Journalism
Greg Weiher
A Purloined Letter: the Zarqawi Gambit
Walt Brasch
Janet Jackson, Bush & No. 542: There are No Halftime Shows
in War
Shadi Hamid
The Music World Explodes in Anger
Norman Madarasz
As Canadian as Corruption
Chris Floyd
Bullets and Ballots
Virginia Tilly
The
Deeper Meaning of the Wall
Amy Goodman / Jeremy
Scahill
Haiti's
Lawyer Says US is Arming Haiti's Anti-Aristide Paramilitaries
Website of the Day
Clear Channel Sucks
February 25, 2004
Dr. Susan Block
Saddam's
Sex Therapist and the Rape of Free Speech
Bruce Anderson
Treacherous Bastards: The Greens and the Dems and Nader
Ron Jacobs
Our Power is on the Streets and
in Our Hearts
Mike Whitney
Bush
and Gay America: the Politics of Duplicity
Sam Husseini
Jesus in 100 Words
John L. Hess
Kick Off or Flub?
Sam Hamod
Bush's Newest Red Herring
Cockburn / St. Clair
Winning
with Nader
Website of the Day
VotePact
February 24, 2004
Ralph Nader
Why
I'm Running for President
Greg Moses
Rally
the Mob! Bush, Gay Marriage and the Constitution
Douglas O'Hara
The
Merchants of Fear: Smearing Nader
Phillip Cryan
Frozen in Time: The WSJ's Paranoid
Lens on Latin America
David Lindorff
John Kerry's China Connection
Jason Leopold
Cheney's Shame: Halliburton Faces New Charges
Gary Younge
Haiti: Throttled by History
Kromm, Masri & Purohit
Why No Democracy in Iraq?
Steve Perry
Tangled Up in Red and Blue: Beware the Electoral College
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February 23, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israel's Apartheid Wall on Trial
at The Hague
Kurt Nimmo
Richard Perle, Executioner: "Heads Should Roll"
Jonathan Franklin
US Soldier Seeks Refugee Status in Canada
Al Krebs
The Liberal "Intelligentsia" v. Nader
Josh Frank
Nader's Nadir? Not a Chance
Bruce Jackson
Nader, Another View: "He's as Evil as Bush"
Gary Leupp
A Misguided
Attack, The Passion, Rabbi Lerner and the Gospels
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March
8, 2004
The Veep and Pakistan
Cheney
Helped Cover-Up Nuclear Proliferation in 1989, So Pentagon Could
Sell Pakistan Fighter Jets
By JASON LEOPOLD
When news of Pakistan's clandestine program involving
its top nuclear scientist selling rogue nations, such as Iran
and North Korea, blueprints for building an atomic bomb was uncovered
last month, the world's leaders waited, with baited breath, to
see what type of punishment President Bush would bestow upon
Pakistan's President Pervez Musharaff.
Bush has, after all, spent his entire
term in office talking tough about countries and dictators that
conceal weapons of mass destruction and even tougher on individuals
who supply rogue nations and terrorists with the means to build
WMDs. For all intents and purposes, Pakistan and Musharraf fit
that description.
Remember, Bush accused Iraq of harboring
a cache of WMDs, which was the primary reason the United States
launched a preemptive strike there a year ago, and also claimed
that Iraq may have given its WMDs to al-Qaeda terrorists and/or
Syria, weapons that, Bush said, could be used to attack the U.S.
Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and
top members of the administration reacted with shock when they
found out that Abdul Qadeer Khan, Pakistan's top nuclear scientist,
spent the past 15 years selling outlaw nations nuclear technology
and equipment. So it was sort of a surprise when Bush, upon finding
out about Khan's proliferation of nuclear technology, let Pakistan
off with a slap on the wrist. But it was all an act. In fact,
it was actually a cover-up designed to shield Cheney because
he knew about the proliferation for more than a decade and did
nothing to stop it.
Like the terrorist attacks on 9-11, the
Bush administration had mountains of evidence on Pakistan's sales
of nuclear technology and equipment to nations vilified by the
U.S._nations that are considered much more of a threat than Iraq_but
turned a blind eye to the threat and allowed it to happen.
In 1989, the year Khan first started
selling nuclear secrets on the black-market; Richard Barlow,
a young intelligence analyst working for the Pentagon prepared
a shocking report for Cheney, who was then working as Secretary
of Defense under the first President Bush administration: Pakistan
built an atomic bomb and was selling its nuclear equipment to
countries the U.S. said was sponsoring terrorism.
But Barlow's findings, as reported in
a January 2002 story in the magazine Mother Jones, were "politically
inconvenient."
"A finding that Pakistan possessed
a nuclear bomb would have triggered a congressionally mandated
cutoff of aid to the country, a key ally in the CIA's efforts
to support Afghan rebels fighting a pro-Soviet government. It
also would have killed a $1.4-billion sale of F-16 fighter jets
to Islamabad," Mother Jones reported.
Ironically, Pakistan, critics say, was
let off the hook last month so the U.S. could use its borders
to hunt for al-Qaeda leader and 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
Cheney dismissed Barlow's report because
he desperately wanted to sell Pakistan the F-16 fighter planes.
Several months later, a Pentagon official was told by Cheney
to downplay Pakistan's nuclear capabilities when he testified
on the threat before Congress. Barlow complained to his bosses
at the Pentagon and was fired.
"Three years later, in 1992, a high-ranking
Pakistani official admitted that the country had developed the
ability to assemble a nuclear weapon by 1987," Mother Jones
reported. "In 1998, Islamabad detonated its first bomb."
During the time that Barlow prepared
his report on Pakistan, Bryan Siebert an Energy Department analyst,
was looking into Saddam Hussein's nuclear program in Iraq. Siebert
concluded that "Iraq has a major effort under way to produce
nuclear weapons," and said that the National Security Council
should investigate his findings. But the Bush administration--which
had been supporting Iraq as a counterweight to the Ayatollah
Khomeini's Iran--ignored the report, the magazine reported.
"This was not a failure of intelligence,"
Barlow told Mother Jones. "The intelligence was in the system."
Cheney went to great lengths to cover-up
Pakistan's nuclear weaponry. In a New Yorker article published
on March 29, 1993, <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040119fr_archive0
2>, investigative reporter Seymour Hersh quoted Barlow as
saying that some high-ranking members inside the CIA and the
Pentagon lied to Congress about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal so
as not to sacrifice the sale of the F-16 fighter planes to Islamabad,
which was secretly equipped to deliver nuclear weapons. Pakistan's
nuclear capabilities and the had become so grave by the spring
of 1990 that then CIA deputy director Richard Kerr said the Pakistani
nuclear threat was worse than! the Cuban Missile crisis in the
1960s.
"It was the most dangerous nuclear
situation we have ever faced since I've been in the U.S. government,"
Kerr said in an interview with Hersh. "It may be as close
as we've come to a nuclear exchange. It was far more frightening
than the Cuban missile crisis."
Presently, Kerr is leading the CIA's
review of prewar intelligence into the Iraqi threat cited by
Bush.
Still, in l989 Cheney and others in the
Pentagon and the CIA continued to hide the reality of Pakistan's
nuclear threat from members of Congress. Hersh explained in his
lengthy New Yorker article that reasons behind the cover-up "revolves
around the fact... that the Reagan Administration had dramatically
aided Pakistan in its pursuit of the bomb."
"President Reagan and his national-security
aides saw the generals who ran Pakistan as loyal allies in the
American proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan: driving
the Russians out of Afghanistan was considered far more important
than nagging Pakistan about its building of bombs. The Reagan
Administration did more than forgo nagging, however; it looked
the other way throughout the mid-nineteen-eighties as Pakistan
assembled its nuclear arsenal with the aid of many millions of
dollars' worth of restricted, high-tech materials bought inside
the United States. Such purchases have always been illegal, but
Congress made breaking the law more costly in 198! 5, when it
passed the Solarz Amendment to the Foreign Assistance Act (the
amendment was proposed by former Representative Stephen J. Solarz,
Democrat of New York), providing for the cutoff of all military
and economic aid to purportedly non-nuclear nations that illegally
export or attempt to export nuclear-related materials from the
United States."
"The government's ability to keep
the Pakistani nuclear-arms purchases in America secret is the
more remarkable because (since 1989) the State Department, the
Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Department (under
Cheney) have been struggling with an internal account of illegal
Pakistani procurement activities, given by a former <C.I.A>.
intelligence officer named Richard M. Barlow," Hersh reported.
"Barlow... was dismayed to learn, at first hand, that State
Department and agency officials were engaged in what he concluded
was a pattern of lying to and misleading Congress about Pakistan's
nuclear-purchasing activities."
Hersh interviewed scores of intelligence
and administration officials for his March 1993 New Yorker story
and many of those individuals confirmed Barlow's claims that
Pakistani nuclear purchases was deliberately withheld from Congress
by Cheney and other officials, for fear of provoking a cutoff
in military and economic aid that would adversely affect the
prosecution of the war in Afghanistan.
It seems that today, Cheney is advising
President Bush to deal with Pakistan's nuclear proliferation
much in the same way he did more than a decade ago. Give the
country a pass, lie to the public about the seriousness of the
matter and tell Pakistan you'll turn the other cheek if the country
agrees to allow U.S. troops to use its borders to hunt for Bin
Laden before the November election.
Jason Leopold
may be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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