Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
24, 2003
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Preemptive Zeal
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
24, 2003
The Toxic Legacy of
the Iraq War
Generational
Casualties
By STAN GOFF
My grandson was born last December at Womack Army
Medical Center, one of the finest medical facilties in the country
now. The labor and delivery room was nicer than many hotel rooms.
The care and attention was nonpareil. Military medical care --
now under idiotic pressure to privatize -- is proof that profit
is often antithetical to the provision of quality services.
My grandson was born there because his
father -- my son -- was entitled to this quality care as a member
of the Army. My son is now languishing in a former palace along
the Euphrates River, surrounded by millions of people who don't
want him there, waiting for mail that takes four to five weeks
to arrive, keeping an ear attuned for incoming mortars, and gazing
at pictures of his son -- our grandson -- who will not know him
when he returns.
My grandson is perfect, and I don't just
say that because I have become a grandparent cliche -- which
I have, with my office and home both converted into shrines full
of baby photos. He is perfect in that he has all his assigned
parts, they function in coordination with one another, and his
growth and development are proceeding, as the medical folk say,
normally. He was born with great lungs and the grip of a longshoreman,
he never seems to get sick, and he seems very interested in all
people, in all music, in squirrels, and in passing automobiles.
He seems to go into a trance when a breeze blows on his face,
and he chatters and blows raspberries when he is excited.
I am crazy in love with this child, spoill
him shamelessly, have already dedicated a book to him, and I
look forward to more grandchildren, having three more kids who
are well into their reproductive years.
At a recent Congressional briefing organized
by Congresswoman Maxine Waters, ten military family members,
myself included, testified about our opposition to Bushfeld's
War. Afterwards, during dinner together, one of the young military
spouses told me that she and her husband, now  stationed in Iraq, had made a decision
not to have children. Since then, those if us involved with the
Bring Them Home Now campaign are hearing this more and more from
military couples. They are worried about depleted uranium.
My grandson is learning to walk, and
he is immensely curious, which makes for a lot of vigilance and
work. But he didn't require massive surgery to survive to his
ninth month, nor does he require a battery of experts and specialists
like he would if he were born without a thyroid gland, or if
he required a drain inserted into his cranial vault, or if his
digestive tract were disconnected.
This happens a lot more than it should
to Iraqi children, and it may happen to American children born
to parents now serving in Iraq. That's why many couples in the
military are now deciding that they will not have children. Here
is an excert from a letter on the Bring Them Home Now web site:
"My husband and I have decided not to have children. We
are afraid that something that we've been exposed to in Iraq
may cause birth defects. This whole war has turned my life upside
down and is even affecting my life years into the future."
For those who are not feint-hearted,
you can visit this site where there are some
very disturbing images of "extreme birth defects" in
Iraq, that are occurring at alarming
rates, lest anyone think this is an irrational fear being expressed
by these military couples.
I am a big fan of these kinds of images,
because the sense of decorum of our so-called press that excludes
"offensive" images is a form of complicity. War is
offensive. If we are to understand war, we need to see the bodies.
People who support it should have to see it. Likewise, if you
want to understand the reality of what is going on in the bodies
of the troops, you need to see these terribly deformed children.
We need to broadcast images of dead people, maimed people, deformed
children, including our own dead and maimed and deformed, and
we need to do it often. Anything else is denial.
The only people who seem to be denying
that depleted uranium may actually be a significant causative
agent in these hideous deformities are the governments of the
United States and Great Britain, who use DU munitions in Iraq.
What a surprise!
But Ross B. Mirkarimi, of the Arms Control
Research Centre said, "Unborn children of the region [are]
being asked to pay the highest price, the integrity of their
DNA." This was a report published in 1992 and largely applied
(or so people thought) to Iraqis, so it didn't seem to matter
here, even in many cases to those in the West who were studying
DU. Let's face it, the slow murder of hundreds of thousands of
Iraqis, disproportionaly children, by sanctions not only did
not arouse American outrage, the US Secretary of State, Madelaine
Albright, said -- when confronted publicly with the numbers --
that it was worth it. (It remains utterly amazing to me that
we still talk very little here about how racism underwrites American
foreign and domestic policy. But the reality is, people often
have to themselves come under attack before they wake up to reality
and begin to recognize their shared humanity.)
The military knows damn well that depleted
uranium, insecticide-impregnated uniforms, insect repellents,
toxic smoke, and the questionable cocktail of inadequately tested
immunizations they have given may be dangerous, alone or in combination.
They are playing the odds that they can squeeze the necessary
three, six, or twenty years out of a troop before all the biomedical
chickens come home to roost, then -- with the able assistance
of the entire US government -- deny that they are responsible.
No one I know of ever signed an enlistment
contract that said "I herein surrender the integrity of
my DNA." But more and more, it seems, that may be exactly
what they've done. What shall I tell my son if he wants to become
the father of a second child?
Show up in DC on October 25th, and show
up mean and angry. Goddamn decorum! And mail the images from
that website to president@whitehouse.gov.
Stan Goff
is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member
of the BRING THEM
HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces
master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email
for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
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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