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Today's
Stories
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The Washington
Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season
December 24, 2003
M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics
of Empire
William S. Lind
Marley's
List for Santa in Wartime
Josh Frank
Iraqi
Oil: First Come, First Serve
Cpt. Paul Watson
The
Mad Cowboy Was Right
Robert Lopez
Nuance
and Innuendo in the War on Iraq
December 23, 2003
Brian J. Foley
Duck
and Cover-up
Will Youmans
Sharon's
Ultimatum
Michael Donnelly
Here
They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco
Uri Avnery
Sharon's
Speech: the Decoded Version
December 22, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray
to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks
Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?
Marjorie Cohn
How to
Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue
Kathy Kelly
The
Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"
December 20 / 21, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
How
to Kill Saddam
Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy
Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali
David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the
Islamic World
Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee
Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush
Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared
Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression
Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN
Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and
Latino Prisoners
Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler
John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane
Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful
Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis
Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race
Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie
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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December
31, 2003
CounterPunch Diary
A
Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead:
So, Count Our Blessings
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Count our blessings, an act the eternally pessimistic
American left usually shuns, on the grounds it might indicate
we've made some headway in progress towards the good, the true
and the beautiful.
First let's look back. 2003 was a pretty
good year. Who can complain about a span of time in which both
William Bennett and Rush Limbaugh, exposed as, respectively,
a compulsive gambler and a drug addict, were installed themselves
in the public stocks amid the derision of the citizenry? Some
say that they've both winched themselves out of the mud, with
Bennett's sessions in Las Vegas and Limbaugh's steady diet of
OxyContin already faded in the public mind. I don't think so.
There's nothing so enjoyable as the plight of a professional
moralizer caught in the wrong part of town.
And again, who can complain about a year
in which the New York Times tripped itself up so gloriously with
no, not the Jayson Blair affair, where the Times thumped its
breast in contrition and self abasement for minor, unimportant
works of the imagination by its young black reporter. I'm talking
about the far larger scandal of Judith Miller's extended series
of alarmist articles about Saddam Hussein's non-existent Weapons
of Mass Destruction. Here the Times has remained more or less
silent about the expose of its star reporter, but Miller's shameless
propagandizing, abetted by her editors, will stand as one of
the most disgraceful displays of tendentious reporting in the
history of the US press, and I include in this category the Times'
terrible performance in the Wen Ho Lee affair.
For a vivid account of just how bad the
Times has been for many, many years, I strongly recommend John
L. Hess's vivid memoir My
Times: a Memoir of Dissent, published by Seven Stories Press.
Hess, cranky, heterodox, cultured and irreverent, is the Ideal
Type of what any member of our profession should be, but who
is usually leached out of the system in the dawn of their careers.
He was a brilliant Paris correspondent for the Times in the 60s
and early 70s, returned to New York and promptly wrote memorable
exposés of the Metropolitan Museum (notably the incredible
antics of its director Thomas Hoving), and of New York's nursing
homes. Then he and his wife Karen briefly took charge of the
food and restaurant column and caused turmoil in that back-scratching
sector. These days we're glad to run the acerbic commentaries
he does for WBAI. Real journalists don't end up teaching ethics
(aka kissing corporate ass) in journalism schools. They write
till they drop. John Hess is a real journalist, virtually an
extinct breed. Long may he write.
Hess pens the Times's obituary as America's
supposedly greatest paper. In his c austic pages there is nothing
more savage, and contrite than his account of what the New York
Times did not report about the Vietnam War in the late 1960s.
Every journalism student, and every reporter should have this
book in their backpacks.
Of course 20003 was a year in which the
governments, the intelligence services, the military bureaucracies,
the intellectual whoremongers and whores of two countries, American
and Britain, displayed themselves as brazen and incompetent liars
as they maneuvered towards war on Iraq. What more could any radical
ask for?
So why did the US want to invade Iraq
in 2003 and finish off Saddam? There are as many rationales as
there were murderers on Christie's Orient Express. In the end
my mind goes back to something my friend the political scientist
Doug Lummis wrote from his home in another outpost of the Empire,
in Okinawa at the time of the first onslaught on Iraq at the
start of the Nineties.
Iraq, Lummis wrote, had been in the Eighties
a model of an oil-producing country thrusting its way out of
the Third World, with a good health system, an efficient bureaucracy
cowed from corrupt practices by a brutal regime. The fundamental
intent of the US in 1991 was to thrust Iraq back, deeper, ever
deeper into Third World indigence.
In the fall of 2003 I was in London and
across a weekend enjoyed the hospitality of the first-class journalist
Richard Gott, also of his wife Vivienne. At one point our conversation
turned to the question of motive, and I was interested to hear
Gott make the same point as Lummis, only about the attack of
2003. I asked him why he thought this, and Gott recalled a visit
he'd made to Baghdad in April, 2003.
This was a time when the natural and
political inclination of most opponents of the impending war
was to stress the fearful toll of the sanctions imposed from
1990 on. Gott had a rather different observation, in part, because
of his experience in Latin America. Baghdad, he said, looked
a lot more prosperous than Havana. "It was clear today,"
Gott wrote after his April, 2003, visit, "from the quantity
of goods in the shops, and the heavy traffic jams in the urban
motorways, that the sanctions menace has been effectively defeated.
Iraq is awakening from a long and depressing sleep, and its economy
is clearly beginning to function once more. No wonder it is in
the firing line."
Eyes other than Gott's no doubt observed
the same signs of economic recovery. Iraq was rising from the
ashes, and so, it had to be thrust down once more. The only "recovery"
permitted would be on Uncle Sam's terms. Or so Uncle Sam, in
his arrogance, supposed.
I've never liked the left's habit here
in the US of announcing clamorously that we're on the brink of
fascism, and that sometime in the next month or two the equivalent
of Hitler's Brown Shirts will be marching down Main Street. There
was a lot of that sort of talk around the time of the Patriot
Act was rushed through Congress. I was a bit more optimistic.
I always thought that when the initial panic after the attacks
on the Twin Towers subsided, a measure of sanity would seep back
into the judicial system, restoring it to normally insane levels.
And so it has come to pass. For sure, if another attack comes,
we'll slide back again, but for now the erosion of the Bill of
Rights has slowed.
2003 gave us other minor pleasures, few
more keenly savored here than the eviction of the loathsome Democrat
Gray Davis from the governor's mansion in Sacramento, California.
Bono did not win the Nobel Peace Prize for which he has ceaselessly
campaigned.
And 2004? Dean versus Bush the mutual
funds scandal it promises to be a lot of fun.
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David
Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
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