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A Journey to Rafah: "We Will Destroy You, If Not In Death, Then in Life" by Jennifer Loewenstein; Senator Facing-Both-Ways: the Double Political Life of John Kerry by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair; General Tommy Franks in Kansas City: "50,000 Dead Americans in Iraq is OK" by Stan Cox. Last month, CounterPunch Online was read by 11 million viewers--by far our biggest month ever. But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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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

 

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


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

 

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

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

 

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


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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