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Today's
Stories
September
25, 2003
Edward
Said
Dignity,
Solidarity and the Penal Colony
Robert
Fisk
Fanning
the Flames of Hatred
Sara Ferguson
Wolfowitz at the New School
David
Krieger
The
Second Nuclear Age
Bill Glahn
RIAA Doublespeak
Al Krebs
ADM and the New York Times: Covering Up Corporate Crime
Michael
S. Ladah
The Obvious Solution: Give Iraq Back to the Arabs
Fran Shor
Arnold and Wesley
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Edward Said: a Monument to Justice and Human Rights
Alexander Cockburn
Edward Said: a Mighty and Passionate
Heart
Website
of the Day
Edward Said: a Lecture on the Tragedy of Palestine
September 24, 2003
Stan Goff
Generational
Casualties: the Toxic Legacy of the Iraq War
William
Blum
Grand Illusions About Wesley Clark
David
Vest
Politics
for Bookies
Jon Brown
Stealing Home: The Real Looting is About to Begin
Robert Fisk
Occupation and Censorship
Latino
Military Families
Bring Our Children Home Now!
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
Website
of the Day
Bands Against Bush
September
23, 2003
Bernardo
Issel
Dancing
with the Diva: Arianna and Streisand
Gary Leupp
To
Kill a Cat: the Unfortunate Incident at the Baghdad Zoo
Gregory
Wilpert
An
Interview with Hugo Chavez on the CIA in Venezuela
Steven
Higgs
Going to Jail for the Cause--Part 2: Charity Ryerson, Young and
Radical
Stan Cox
The Cheney Tapes: Can You Handle the Truth?
Robert
Fisk
Another Bloody Day in the Death of Iraq
William S. Lind
Learning from Uncle Abe: Sacking the Incompetent
Elaine
Cassel
First They Come for the Lawyers, Then the Ministers
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website
of the Day
The
Baghdad Death Count
Recent
Stories
September
20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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
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
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
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
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
25, 2003
Edward Said, Dead
at 67
A
Mighty and Passionate Heart
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
A mighty and a passionate heart has ceased to
beat.
Edward Said died in hospital in New York
City Wednesday night at 6.30 pm, felled at last by complications
arising from the leukemia he fought so gamely ever since the
early 1990s.
We march through life buoyed by those
comrades-in-arms we know to be marching with us, under the same
banners, flying the same colors, sustained by the same hopes
and convictions. They can be a thousand miles away; we may not
have spoken to them in months; but their companionship is burned
into our souls and we are sustained by the knowledge that they
are with us in the world.
Few more than Edward Said, for me and
so many others beside. How many times, after a week, a month
or more, I have reached him on the phone and within a second
been lofted in my spirits, as we pressed through our updates:
his trips, his triumphs, the insults sustained; the enemies rebuked
and put to flight. Even in his pettiness he was magnificent,
and as I would laugh at his fury at some squalid gibe hurled
at him by an eighth-rate scrivener, he would clamber from the
pedestal of martyrdom and laugh at himself.
He never lost his fire, even as the leukemia
pressed, was routed, pressed again. He lived at a rate that would
have felled a man half his age and ten times as healthy: a plane
to London, an honorary degree, on to Lebanon, on to the West
Bank, on to Cairo, to Madrid, back to New York. And all the while
he was pouring out the Said prose that I most enjoyed, the fiery
diatribes he distributed to CounterPunch and to a vast world
audience. At the top of his form his prose has the pitiless,
relentless clarity of Swift.
The Palestinians will never know a greater
polemical champion. A few weeks ago I was, with his genial permission,
putting together from three of his
essays the concluding piece in our forthcoming CounterPunch
collection, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I was seized, as so often before, by the power
of the prose: how could anyone read those searing sentences and
not boil with rage, while simultaneously admiring Edward's generosity
of soul: that with the imperative of justice and nationhood for
his people came the humanity that called for reconciliation between
Palestinians and Israeli Jews.
His literary energy was prodigious. Memoir,
criticism, homily, fiction poured from his pen, a fountain pen
that reminded one that Edward was very much an intellectual in
the nineteenth- century tradition of a Zola or of a Victor Hugo,
who once remarked that genius is a promontory in the infinite.
I read that line as a schoolboy, wrote it in my notebook and
though I laugh now a little at the pretension of the line, I
do think of Edward as a promontory, a physical bulk on the intellectual
and political landscape that forced people, however disinclined
they may have been, to confront the Palestinian experience.
Years ago his wife Mariam asked me if
I would make available my apartment in New York, where I lived
at that time, as the site for a surprise 40th birthday for Edward.
I dislike surprise parties but of course agreed. The evening
arrived; guests assembled in my sitting room on the eleventh
floor of 333 Central Park West. The dining room table groaned
under Middle Eastern delicacies. Then came the word from the
front door. Edward and Mariam had arrived! They were ascending
in the elevator. Then we could all hear Edward's furious bellow:
"But I don't want to go to dinner with *******, Alex!"
They entered at last and the shout went up from seventy throats,
Happy Birthday! He reeled back in surprise and then recovered,
and then saw about the room all those friends happy to have traveled
thousands of miles to shake his hand. I could see him slowly
expand with joy at each new unexpected face and salutation.
He never became blase in the face of
friendship and admiration, or indeed honorary degrees, just as
he never grew a thick skin. Each insult was as fresh and as wounding
as the first he ever received. A quarter of century ago he would
call, with mock heroic English intonation, "Alex-and-er,
have you seen the latest New Republic? Have you read this filthy,
this utterly disgusting diatribe? You haven't? Oh, I know, you
don't care about the feelings of a mere black man such as myself."
I'd start laughing, and say I had better things to do than read
Martin Peretz, or Edward Alexander or whoever the assailant was,
but for half an hour he would brood, rehearse fiery rebuttals
and listen moodily as I told him to pay no attention.
He never lost the capacity to be wounded
by the treachery and opportunism of supposed friends. A few weeks
ago he called to ask whether I had read a particularly stupid
attack on him by his very old friend Christopher Hitchens in
the Atlantic Monthly. He described with pained sarcasm a phone
call in which Hitchens had presumably tried to square his own
conscience by advertising to Edward the impending assault. I
asked Edward why he was surprised, and indeed why he cared. But
he was surprised and he did care. His skin was so, so thin, I
think because he knew that as long as he lived, as long as he
marched onward as a proud, unapologetic and vociferous Palestinian,
there would be some enemy on the next housetop down the street
eager to pour sewage on his head.
Edward, dear friend, I wave adieu to
you across the abyss. I don't even have to close my eyes to savor
your presence, your caustic or merry laughter, your elegance,
your spirit as vivid as that of d'Artagnan, the fiery Gascon.
You will burn like the brightest of flames in my memory, as you
will in the memories of all who knew and admired and loved you.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 20 / 22, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Silliest Show in Town
Alexander
Cockburn
Lighten
Up, America!
Peter Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Execution of Robert Emmet
Anne Brodsky
Return
to Afghanistan
Saul Landau
Guillermo and Me
Phan Nguyen
Mother Jones Smears Rachel Corrie
Gila Svirsky
Sharon, With Eyes Wide Open
Gary Leupp
On Apache Terrorism
Kurt Nimmo
Colin
Powell: Exploiting the Dead of Halabja
Brian
Cloughley
Colin Powell's Shame
Carol Norris
The Moral Development of George W. Bush
Bill Glahn
The Real Story Behind RIAA Propaganda
Adam Engel
An Interview with Danny Scechter, the News Dissector
Dave Lindorff
Good Morning, Vietnam!
Mark Scaramella
Contracts and Politics in Iraq
John Ross
WTO
Collapses in Cancun: Autopsy of a Fiasco Foretold
Justin Podur
Uribe's Desperate Squeals
Toni Solo
The Colombia Three: an Interview with Caitriona Ruane
Steven Sherman
Workers and Globalization
David
Vest
Masked and Anonymous: Dylan's Elegy for a Lost America
Ron Jacobs
Politics of the Hip-Hop Pimps
Poets
Basement
Krieger, Guthrie and Albert
Website of the
Weekend
Ted Honderich:
Terrorism for Humanity?
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