Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September
23, 2003
Yigal
Bronner
The
Truth About the Wall
Website of the Day
Bands Against Bush
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
Recent
Stories
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.
|
September
23, 2003
Talking with Hugo
Chavez
"We Have Proof of the
CIA in Venezuela"
By GREGORY WILPERT
In a three-hour lunch meeting with foreign journalists
yesterday, Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez roamed over a wide
variety of topics, from the cancellation of his trip to the U.S.,
to the recall referendum, to the WTO meeting in Cancun, and to
Venezuela-Colombia relations, among other issues.
One of the first and perhaps more puzzling
topics that was broached was the relatively sudden cancellation
of the president's trip to the U.S., scheduled for late September.
President Chavez was supposed to give a speech at the opening
of the UN in New York, to visit Houston, Texas, the city where
the state-owned oil company Citgo will have its new headquarters,
and to give a speech in Harlem.
While the President said he regretted
not being able to give the speech in Harlem and to visit Houston,
he said he cancelled the trip for two main reasons. First, he
said that the main reason was that there were security concerns,
the details of which he could not disclose. Second, he said that
he does not like UN summits. "I go there and I don't feel
like speaking because practically no one listens. It's a dialogue
of the deaf; it's silly. You go there to listen to one discourse
after another, one day after the other and for what? What is
the purpose? I prefer to denounce, to say that this system is
not working. I have a natural rejection of these summits."
He then went on to elaborate how fundamentally undemocratic the
UN is and that it needs to be democratized.
With regard to the letter of protest
that representatives of the opposition coalition Democratic Coordinator
sent to the Organization of American States, the UNDP, and the
Carter Center, Chavez said that it does not surprise him, since
the opposition wants "a referendum according to their preferences."
He elaborated that in the past the National Electoral Council
was an arm of the two main governing parties, Copei and AD, which
helped them organize fraud and which funded their election observers.
The other, mostly leftist, parties never had enough resources
to post witnesses at all polling places. Now, however, there
is a National Electoral Council that is independent and the opposition
complains, since they are not used to that, said Chavez.
Doubts on recall referendum
Asked if he thought that there would
be a recall referendum before his term ends, Chavez responded
that "it is going to be extremely difficult for the opposition
to comply with the requirements for a recall referendum."
He added that several representatives of opposition parties have
told him in private that they actually are not interested in
a recall referendum because they would rather concentrate on
the upcoming elections for state governors, which are supposed
to take place in June or July of 2004. He thus doubts that there
is a real will on the part of the opposition to even organize
a proper recall referendum. But, nonetheless, "there is
a possibility" that there will be a referendum, but only
if the opposition "takes its opposition role seriously"
and leaves aside all illegal efforts to oust him.
International issues
On the international front, Chavez revealed
that his government is in the possession of a video, which his
security forces secretly recorded, of a CIA officer giving a
class to Venezuelans on surveillance. Joking he said, "The
technique could not have been very good, since we did manage
to film him." He argues that this is evidence that the CIA
is involved in clandestine activity in Venezuela, after the coup
attempt, in addition to the evidence he has of U.S. involvement
before and during the coup; but his government has so far not
issued a formal complaint to the U.S. government. Some day, he
said, these pieces of evidence will be released, but he does
not know when.
With respect to the unclear stand Venezuela
recently took with regard to international property rights at
the WTO meeting in Cancun, the president promised to clarify
Venezuela's position, saying that "it's not the first time
that there are contradictions" within the government on
an issue.
While Venezuela's Minister of Commerce
and Production took a strong position on the issue of eliminating
agricultural subsidies for first world countries, along with
other third world countries, organized in the "Group of
21", Venezuela almost signed an agreement which would have
limited the use of generic medications to only three diseases,
AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis. This would have gone directly
against the policy of Venezuela's office on intellectual property
rights (SAPI), which maintains that public health must take precedence
over the profits of transnational pharmaceutical companies.
Venezuela would not
recognize the Iraqi representative to OPEC
Referring to the upcoming OPEC meeting,
Chavez announced that his government would not recognize the
Iraqi representative as an official representative because "unfortunately
there is no government in Baghdad, it is anarchy, with constant
destabilization." "They have not been able to restart
their production anyway," added the president. Rather, there
would be informal talks at the next OPEC meeting on September
24 with an observer from the occupation forces in Iraq.
Finally, Chavez said that relations between
Venezuela and Colombia are very complicated because there are
people who are interested in sabotaging this relationship. He
reiterated that his government is not providing any kind of support
to the Colombian guerilla movements, despite what the opposition
claims. Rather, Venezuela's position with regard to the conflict
in Colombia is one of neutrality, of neither opposing nor supporting
the guerilla movement. "We don't want to support the path
of war in Colombia, we want to support the path of peace,"
added Chavez.
Gregory Wilpert
specializes in writing about Venezuela. He can be reached at:
Venezuelanayisis.com
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?
Keep CounterPunch
Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
home / subscribe
/ about us / books
/ archives / search
/ links /
|