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Today's Stories

September 29, 2003

Uri Avnery
The Magnificent 27


Recent Stories

September 26 / 28, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Alan Dershowitz, Plagiarist

David Price
Teaching Suspicions

Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity

Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the Patriot Act

Brian Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again

Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama

Robert Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions

M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA

John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN

Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada

William S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security

Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia

Chris Floyd
Vanishing Act

Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui

Richard Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved

George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said

Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized

Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss

Mickey Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice

Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said

Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room

Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie

Website of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?

 

 

September 25, 2003

Edward Said
Dignity, Solidarity and the Penal Colony

Robert Fisk
Fanning the Flames of Hatred

Sarah 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

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

 

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Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?

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CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians

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Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War

Wendell Berry
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CounterPunch Wire
WMD: Who Said What When

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The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War: What America Says Does Not Go

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September 29, 2003

General Envy?

Think Shinseki, Not Clark

By WAYNE MADSEN

While Democrats from Little Rock to Washington, DC go gaga over retired General Wesley Clark's recently announced candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, other Democrats rightly question Clark's past decisions and his future intentions. It is understandable that Democrats, weary of the crypto-fascism of the Bush administration, are willing to support any retired general for the highest office in the land. With Joseph Lieberman sinking fast in the Democratic Leadership Council play book, many Democratic neo-conservatives see Clark as the "anybody but Dean" candidate. Michael Moore, who is as fervently anti-Bush as anyone, sees Clark as the only candidate capable of beating Bush, merely because Clark is a former general who adds military-oriented "gravitas" to the Democratic field.

Allow me to offer up another former four-star general who witnessed firsthand the insanity of the neo-con clique that took over the national security and foreign policy machinery of the United States. Retired General Eric Shinseki. the former Army Chief of Staff, clashed repeatedly with the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz-Feith troika over the handling of the war in Iraq. After Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz publicly questioned Shinseki's testimony before Congress that the United States would need 250,000 troops in post-war Iraq, Rumsfeld dissed the general by boycotting his Pentagon retirement ceremony. Rumsfeld decided it would be better to be hobnobbing it with Albanian mafiosi figures and old Balkan war buddies of General Clark in Tirana than in attending a ceremony honoring the distinguished 38-year career of the outgoing Army chief.

If General Shinseki decided to run for national office as a Democrat, he would help negate those who say the Democrats do not have the necessary national security credentials. Shinseki would also add to the mix a general respected by his former subordinates and colleagues -- and that is something Clark cannot say about himself. Those Democrats who abhor the pro-war policies of Clark, a man who has waffled on his support of Bush's war against Iraq and who was more than happy to bomb downtown Belgrade, including the main Yugoslav television building where a number of my fellow journalists were killed, can be assured that although Shinseki served in the Balkans theater, he was never accused by his fellow NATO officers of bellicosity and narcissism.

Would Shinseki, a decorated Japanese-American veteran of the Vietnam War, enter the political fray? All indications are that Shinseki has as much, if not more, political acumen as Clark. Shinseki recently spoke to a meeting of state politicians in Honolulu where he received standing ovations from over thirty State House of Representatives Speakers, both Democrats and Republicans. Shinseki publicly bemoaned the day-by-day deaths of U.S. troops in Iraq. A West Point graduate, Shinseki's many tours in Europe, including one in Bosnia as the head of the NATO Stabilization Force, would place him in a superb position to repair America's damaged relations with many of America's NATO allies. Clark's ill-tempered decisions, on the other hand, did not ingratiate himself to a number of his fellow NATO commanders during the Balkans Wars. Clark is the worst of all candidates as far as mending the transatlantic alliance is concerned.

A native of Kauai, Hawaii, Shinseki would be the first Asian-American to run for such a high office. That would certainly stem the GOP's much ballyhooed attempt to win California, a state with a large Asian-American, voting-intensive population. Critics would argue that Dean and Shinseki are from small states that have only seven electoral votes between them. But Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter both proved that one does not have to be from a huge state to win the White House. And the last two Presidents from mega-state Texas have plunged the United States into costly and deadly wars. Small states, like small countries, are not necessarily so bad. After all, tiny Belgium and Luxembourg stood up to America's insane war against Iraq. And it could be Vermont and Hawaii that help to pull America's other 48 states out of the morass brought about by the Bush administration. As an Asian-American, Shinseki is also painfully aware how laws like the Patriot Act and its possible successors can be used to target specific ethnic groups for harassment and even internment by the government. And being from a liberal state like Hawaii, Shinseki would likely never utter the comment Clark made about Bush during the Democratic debate: "He's neither compassionate nor conservative." Compassionate is fine but if Clark expected a conservative administration, he's running in the wrong primary.

Shinseki would also relate much better to military veterans who despise what Bush has done to veterans' benefits, including the cutting of $1.5 billion from veterans' long-term medical care. And for the active duty military and their families who are facing extended tours of duty in Iraq, Shinseki is on record opposing the Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz fuzzy game plan for Iraqi occupation. Unlike Clark, who was fired for dangerous brinkmanship in Kosovo, Shinseki wanted to put the reins on the neo-con rush to war and to do much more reasoned planning for an Iraqi military occupation.

Like other soldier-politicians, including Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall, Shinseki represents that rare military professional who understands that war can only be the final answer in diplomacy after all other options fail. Clark's warmongering in the Balkans demonstrates he does not share with Shinseki that same honored philosophy demonstrated by a number of past military commanders, American and foreign, who traded in their uniforms for politician business suits.

Shinseki's ignoble treatment at the hands of the neo-cons would also present the opportunity for a day of reckoning with the scoundrels who currently infest the body politic of America with an alien philosophy of constant warfare and global expansionism. Shinseki, as a national office holder, working hand-in-hand with a few of the anti-war Democratic candidates, would have my total support in purging the neo-cons and their doctrine from the American political landscape, once, and hopefully, for all.

Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist and columnist. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden Truth. He is the co-author, with John Stanton, of the forthcoming book, "America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George Bush II."

Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com

Weekend Edition Features for Sept. 26 / 28, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
Alan Dershowitz, Plagiarist

David Price
Teaching Suspicions

Saul Landau
Before the Era of Insecurity

Ron Jacobs
The Chicago Conspiracy Trial and the Patriot Act

Brian Cloughley
The Strangeloves Win Again

Norman Solomon
Wesley and Me: a Real-Life Docudrama

Robert Fisk
Bomb Shatters Media Illusions

M. Shahid Alam
A Muslim Sage Visits the USA

John Chuckman
American Psycho: Bush at the UN

Mark Schneider
International Direct Action
The Spanish Revolution to the Palestiniana Intifada

William S. Lind
How $87 Billion Could Buy Some Real Security

Douglas Valentine
Gold Warriors: the Plundering of Asia

Chris Floyd
Vanishing Act

Elaine Cassel
Play Cat and Moussaoui

Richard Manning
A Conservatism that Once Conserved

George Naggiar
The Beautiful Mind of Edward Said

Omar Barghouti
Edward Said: a Corporeal Dream Not Yet Realized

Lenni Brenner
Palestine's Loss is America's Loss

Mickey Z.
Edward Said: a Well-Reasoned Voice

Tanweer Akram
The Legacy of Edward Said

Adam Engel
War in the Smoking Room

Poets' Basement
Katz, Ford, Albert & Guthrie

Website of the Weekend
Who the Hell is Stew Albert?

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