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Today's
Stories
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
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
February 20 / 22, 2004
Cockburn / St. Clair
Kerry:
He's Peaking Already!
Derek Seidman
Chasing
Judith Miller from the Stage: Watch Her Run!
Ghada Karmi
Sharon is not the Problem
Vanessa Jones
This Week in Redfern, a Boy Dies, Chased by Cops
Ben Granby
Anatomy of a Night Raid on Balad, Iraq
John Holt
An Air That Kills: Greed, Apathy, Dead People
Saul Landau
Entry from a White House Diary
Tom Jackson
Why They Couldn't Wait to Invade Iraq
Frederick B. Hudson
Slave Power and the Constitution: Jefferson, Slaves, Haiti and
Hypocrisy
Roger Burbach
Argentina Fights Back
Kate Doyle
Lessons on Justice from Guatemala
Mike Whitney
Operation Enduring Misery: the Afghanistan Debacle
Greg Moses
What Gives Texas A&M the Right to Trample the Civil Rights
Act?
David Krieger
US Elections: an Opportunity to Debate Nuclear Weapons
Sam Bahour
Palestinian Issue Riddles Bush's Budget
David Grenier
You Could Get 10 Years in Prison Just for Reading This
Charles Sullivan
Corporatism vs. Single Party Politics
Poet's Basement
Hilda White, Larry Kearney & Stew Albert
Website of the Weekend
The Rumsfeld Fighting Technique
February 19, 2004
Cecilie Surasky
Anti-Semitism
at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw
Ray McGovern
Iraq
Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd
Get Away With It?
Tariq Ali
How Far
Will Bush Go in Iraq?
Ralph Nader
Whither
the Nation?
Wayne Madsen
Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons?
Norman Solomon
The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble
Christopher Brauchli
Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT
Mike Whitney
Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other"
Lewis Carroll
Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale
Website of the Day
Sex Toy Horoscope
February 18, 2004
William Wilgus
Bush:
AWOL and Dereliction of Duty
William Blum
Mush-Minded
Liberals
Dave Lindorff
Bush's China Syndrome
Greg Weiher
Why
is Kerry Getting a Pass?
Mike Griffin
Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber
Mark Hand
Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"
February 17, 2004
Mike Ferner
The
Countryside Murders in Iraq
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporation
as Psychopath
Marjorie Cohn
DrakeGate:
a Victory for Free Speech
Kurt Nimmo
Bush's
Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire"
Greg Bates
Nader Ambush: a New Low for The
Nation
Ximena Ortiz
A Bush
Doctrine, of Sorts
Gary Leupp
Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji?
Sen. John Kerry
"The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America"
Steve Perry
Kerry
1, Drudge 0
February 16, 2004
James Johnston
Huddling
with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World
Sara Eltantawi
To
Wear the Hijab or Not
Bruce Anderson
Kevin
Cooper and the Midnight Needle
Elaine Cassel
Feds
on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas
Rahul Mahajan
Bush,
Is the Tide Finally Turning?
Kevin Cooper
The Ritual of Death
Stan Cox
Goodbye, Howard Dean
Larry David
My War
Steve Perry
Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing
Website of the Day
Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made
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
Click Here
for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edtion
March 6 / 7, 2004
Mission Accomplished
in Haiti
Onward
to Venezuela?
By KURT NIMMO
Hugo Chavez, in no uncertain terms, has warned
the Bushites he will use the oil weapon against the United States
if Bush attacks Venezuela, America's fourth-largest oil exporter.
"[I]f Mr. Bush is possessed with
the madness of trying to blockade Venezuela, or worse for them,
to invade Venezuela in response to the desperate song of his
lackeys... sadly not a drop of petroleum will come to them from
Venezuela," Hugo Chavez recently told supporters, according
to AFP/Reuters.
Is Chavez paranoid?
Hardly.
Recall the CIA attempted coup against
him in 2002.
How do we know the CIA engineered the
failed coup? "Same way we know that the sun will rise tomorrow
morning," writes Bill Blum, former State Department employee.
"That's what it's always done and there's no reason to think
that tomorrow morning will be any different."
The problem is, for the Bush administration,
Chavez is not part of the neoliberal New World Global plan. "I
consider myself a humanist, and a humanist has to be anti-neoliberal,"
Chavez has said.
Moreover, Chavez considers himself a
bolivariano, that is to say he takes inspiration from the Carta
de Jamaica and the Discurso de Angostura, texts written by Simon
Bolivar, called El Liberator because he kicked the Spaniards
out of Bolivia, Panama, Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela. In addition to fighting against
foreign invasion and economic domination, Bolivar's philosophy,
as practiced by Chavez, translates into land redistribution for
the poor and an increase of oil income for the government.
In other words, less money for Bush's
Big Oil buddies and more for the people of Venezuela.
It doesn't help Chavez also sells oil
to Cuba, visited Saddam Hussein, and sacked the upper management
of Petroleos de Venezuela, the nation's oil company, infamous
for its corruption.
But what really rankles Bush and Big
Oil is the fact their CIA-engineered coup d'etat on April 12,
2002 did not stick.
Unlike the seemingly effortless removal
of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti, getting rid of Chavez will
not be easy.
In the short time Chavez was held at
a prison on the Venezuelan Caribbean island of Orchila after
the CIA-sponsored coup in April, 2002, Fedecamaras business lackey
and oil executive Pedro Carmona dissolved the National Assembly,
voided the 1999 Constitution introduced under Chavez and approved
by popular vote in a national referendum, fired Supreme Court
justices, repealed laws that gave the government control of the
economy, and handed control of Petroleos de Venezuela over to
Gen. Guaicaipuro Lameda, an active military officer.
As Philip Reeker, US State Department
spokesman, said at the time, "We want to see a return to
democracy" in Venezuela.
For Bush, the State Department, and the
CIA, voiding constitutions approved by popular vote is the only
"democracy" the third world should expect. As a prime
example of Bush's grotesque version of democracy, look no further
than Iraq where an American proconsul and a gaggle of handpicked
lackeys rule and popular elections become more and more remote
by the day.
No doubt the Americans would feel more
at home with another Perez Jimenez, the brutal army captain,
virulent anti-communist, and self-appointed dictator of Venezuela
who did such an effective job eliminating progressive reforms
that Eisenhower gave him the Legion of Merit.
"The anti-Chavistas don't equate
democracy with voting," writes Greg Palast, who interviewed
Chavez in 2002. "With 80 per cent of Venezuela's population
at or below the poverty level, elections are not attractive to
the protesting financiers. Chavez had won the election in 1998
with a crushing 58 per cent of the popular vote and that was
unlikely to change except at gunpoint." Bush, the IMF,
and Venezuela's ruling elite are nostalgic for the days when
the notorious embezzler of public funds, Carlos Andres Perez,
and Accion Democratica ruled. In 1989, Perez sent the military
to slaughter 1,000 workers and poor people from the cerros, or
shantytowns, for the audacity of protesting against an IMF austerity
plan.
Following the slaughter, IMF Managing
Director Michael Camdessus wrote to Perez and said he was "profoundly
moved" by the loss of life but said the IMF was convinced
"that the economic policies were well-conceived." No
word if Camdessus was "profoundly moved" by the further
impoverishment of pensioners and the poor for the sake of US
creditors holding Venezuela's debt.
Chavez blamed the CIA for the failed
coup, and for good reason: Charles S. Shapiro, the US ambassador
in Caracas and former Deputy Chief of Mission at the US embassy
in Chile at the time of the CIA-sponsored coup against Salvador
Allende, admitted that military training camps for Venezuelan
opposition forces are currently being run in Florida. For some
reason the Ministry of Homeland Security does not seem to mind.
If it walks and talks like the CIA, good
chance it is the CIA.
"On January 29, 2003, The U.S. daily,
the Wall Street Journal, published an editorial revealing the
existence of terrorist training camps in Florida," writes
CasaVenezuela editor Dozthor Zurlent. "Rodolfo Frometa,
a Cuban, and former Army Captain Luis Eduardo Garcia, a Venezuelan,
are named in the article as the leaders of the paramilitary coalition
formed by the 'F-4 Commandos' and 'The Venezuelan Patriotic Junta.'
Garcia, a former Captain, was one of the leaders of the defeated
coup against democratically elected president Hugo Chavez Frias
in Venezuela in April 2002."
Florida is where the CIA's Task Force
WH-4, Branch 4 of the Western Hemisphere Division, set up training
camps for the failed Bay of Pigs covert operation against Cuba.
According to Shapiro, plotting the overthrow
of Venezuela's democratically elected government "is not
necessarily a crime," especially when that country has a
whole lot of mighty fine sweet crude and a leader with funny
ideas about empowering poor negro y indio folk.
Bush and the bankers have a little problem.
Globalization is taking heat all over Central and South America,
from Bolivia to Chiapas. Opposition to the FTAA, a sort of NAFTA
on steroids, is nearly universal. In October, Bolivians brought
down neoliberal President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. "All
governments in Latin America, even those most solicitous of the
United States, know they are negotiating the FTAA with a loaded
and angry popular movement cocked at their political heads,"
writes David Moberg for In These Times.
For the Bushites, though, "loaded
and angry" popular movements are not the problem; under
brutal enough conditions, those movements can be stifled.
The problem is Hugo Chavez.
They blame him not only for the fall
of Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada, but also for funding Colombia's
FARC and ELN. Moreover, they say Chavez is conspiring with Fidel
Castro and offering sanctuary for "European leftists, retired
East European intelligence officers and activists from countries
on the U.S. list of state sponsors of terrorism," as the
AP hysterically reported in January. The Bush Ministry of Disinformation,
U.S. News & World Report division, would have us believe
"Middle Eastern terrorist groups" are operating "support
cells" in Venezuela and elsewhere in the Andean region.
As investigative journalist Jeremy Bigwood
discovered through an FIOA request, the National Endowment for
Democracy, a well-documented CIA front, has backed anti-Chavez
projects and recall referendums in Venezuela.
The documents Bigwood made public reveal
ties between the US embassy in Caracas and Chavez's opposition,
that is to say the ruling elite and business interests pushing
Washington's neoliberal agenda. Add to this the CIA-esque training
camps in Florida run by Rodolfo Frometa and Captain Luis Eduardo
Garcia, and it becomes obvious what the game plan is -- ousting
the democratically elected leader of Venezuela and installing
an obsequious lackey, such as Carlos Andres Perez, a true-blue
servant for neoliberalism and the Wall Street loan sharks.
No wonder Chavez called Bush an "asshole."
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 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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