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Today's
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November 13, 2003
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
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
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November
13, 2003
The Ben Artzi Verdict
Court
to IDF: Stop Mistreating Pacifists
By ADAM KELLER
For an hour we sat in the overcrowded and badly
ventilated courtroom of the Jaffa Military Court, listening to
presiding judge, Colonel Avi Levi, reading out a long verdict--hard
to understand as he was rushing through the document. The text
gave different and contradicting pointers as to the outcome.
"We have become convinced of the
sincerity of Yoni Ben Artzi's pacifist convictions, and we are
far from feeling that the Conscience Committee acted at its best
when it rejected his request for exemption. The assertion that
he wanted to avoid military service for personal convenience
does not stand up to the proven record of his spending than a
year behind bars, and to his rejecting offers of easy and comfortable
military service made to him by various high officers. Nor do
we accept the prosecutor's contention that his participation
in the Yesh Gvul rally proves him to be a political refuser rather
than a pacifist. A pacifist could have political opinions, too.
Objecting to Israel's rule behind the Green Line is exactly the
opinion which we would expect a pacifist to hold and we would
have been surprised to find him holding a different one.
"In his testimony in this court,
Colonel Simchi--head of the Conscience Committee--admitted to
many shortcomings of the committee which he led. He is to be
commended for his honesty. Nevertheless, this committee is the
constituted authority entrusted with determining whether or not
a person liable for military service would or wouldn't get an
exemption. This court is not empowered to act as a court of appeal
upon the Conscience Committee.
"Moreover, Ben Artzi appealed against
the committee's findings to the Supreme Court, and was rejected.
This court is certainly not a court of appeal upon the Supreme
Court.
"We cannot accept the learned councel's
assertion that the military authorities' conduct towards the
accused was so grossly unfair as to render the order upon him
to enlist illegal. It was a legal order, and we cannot but find
him guilty of disobeying that legal order. Nevertheless, we strongly
call upon the military authorities and the minister of defence
to review the facts of the case and to reconvene the Conscience
Committee to discuss once again the issue of whether or not Yoni
Ben Artzi should get an exemption from military service."
Unlike the normal practice, the judges
did not just disperse and end the session. Rather, as soon as
he was finished, Colonel Levi summoned prosecutor Yaron Kostelitz
and defending lawyer Michael Sfard and they remained closeted
at his bureau for more than half an hour. Meanwhile, in the courtroom
the TV cameras focused upon Ben Artzi and his father Matanya,
and all around intensive discussion and debate.
Some who followed this trial from the
start were furious: "Damn this judge! After all that was
revealed, how can he find him guilty!" But Yoni himself
did not seem so disappointed. "I am as satisfied as I could
have been in a military court. These three judges have gone out
of their way to state that they believe me, and accept the sincerity
of my pacifist convictions, and they rejected one by one all
the counter-claims of the prosecution. They did have to find
me guilty on disobeying the order. After all, I did disobey that
order."
When finally emerging from the judge's
bureau, and immediately pounced upon by the waiting journalists,
Adv. Sfard was quite upbeat: "There is no question of discussing
any punishment at this moment. The ball is now in the court of
the army's Legal Department. They have to answer the very strong
suggestion made by the court to reconvene the Conscience Committee.
If I was in their place i would think twice before rejecting
it. Despite the conviction they didn't come out of this trial
very well. For the first time in the history of Israel, a military
court--three judges acting unanimously--recognized a person in
front of them to be a pacifist. The court, a flesh of the army's
flesh, is demanding from the military authorities to stop mistreating
this fine young man, who has suffered enough, to grant him at
last the exemption he should have gotten two years ago. Let's
see what they will do."
***
What will the implications of this verdict
be for the other five draft resisters, in whose own court martial
we heard yesterday the defence summation?
Before the court started, some 150 people
had turned up, quite impressive on a working day. Fortunately
the rain had let up shortly before the demo began. Signs were
unfurled: "Conscience in prison--stupidity in power",
"Alternative Service to COs!", "Occupation is
in the dock here!" and a group of youngsters started singing
"Go to Hebron / Fight for Sharon / And come back in a coffin".
Chen Gutman took the megaphone and read a poem written by Yehonathan
Gefen some twenty years ago, before she herself was born: "We
celebrate independence / On the backs of another people / We
feel completely free / To kick them around and cut down their
trees..." Will more generations have to grow up into the
reality of ongoing occupation?
At 9.00 we filed in. Knesset Members
Bronfman, Barake and Makhoul showed up, as did former KM Gozanski.
Dr. Anat Matar, philosophy lecturer and the mother of Haggai,
spoke from the aisle: "There are far too many of us today
to fit into this courtroom, even though we dragged extra benches
in. Please go out at 10.30 and give your place to one of those
waiting outside." From the dock where The Five sat, Matan
Kaminer turned his head and smiled: "Thank you all for coming!"
Then the judges entered.
Adv. Dov Chenin, lawyer and veteran political
and environmental campaigner, started his well-constructed exposition.
"Last week in this courtroom, my colleague of the prosecution
went on at length about the danger of anarchy and chaos which
would ensue from tolerating Conscientious Objection. I defy him
to produce even a single historical example of a state or society
which was disrupted by the recognition of the Freedom of Conscience.
There is none. But many are the examples of horrors which came
upon societies and states by an excess of Non-conscientious Obedience.
The experiments of Milgrom and other
social psychologists have shown that a large part of humanity
is capable of tolerating and taking part in evil acts--not necessarily
out of cruelty or sadism, but simply out of conformism and acceptance
of authority. Those who defy authority and stick to their own
deeply-held perception of right and wrong are a vital lubricant
to society.
We need but look at the kind of person
which our ancestors, who wrote the Bible, held up as an ideal.
Look at te story of Moses. He only survived babyhood because
two Hebrew women and an Egyptian princess conspired to break
the Egyptian law according to which little Moses should have
been drowned in the river together with the other babies. Growing
up, Moses killed an Egyptian overseer who was beating a Hebrew
slave, and had to flee into the desert as an outlaw. Then, he
came back as an agitator fomenting dissent an rebellion among
the slaves. Later still, this contentious person was debating
with God Himself and often got the best of the argument.
A bit later in history, in the first
half of the Nineteenth Century, there was a person who took Moses
as her example. A woman named Harriet Tubman, who regularly went
into the south to take slaves away from the plantations and smuggle
them to freedom. There was a price on her head, but since her
nickname was "Moses" the pursuers did not look for
a woman. By the terms of her time, she was a criminal. She deliberately
broke the laws duly passed by Congress and enforced by the Supreme
Court of the United States. She was a thief, who stole from the
slave-owners a lot of valuable property. Yet today who of these
people would be considered the criminal?
Yet, you may well ask: what has all this
to do with this court? This is a court of law, it can only render
judgement according to the law of the land, not according abstract
moral or philosophical principles. But that is exactly my contention:
the Freedom of Conscience, this vital spark which is so crucial
to human society, is indeed recognized as part and parcel of
Israeli law. My colleague of the prosecution, who spoke at length
on obscure points of military procedural law, made hardly any
mention of the Constitutional Revolution which occurred in the
Israeli judicial system in 1992, when the Knesset adopted the
Basic Law on Human Liberty and Dignity.
As Judge Aharon Barak, President of the
Supreme Court, has shown, from that moment on the basic human
rights have become a fundamental norm of Israeli law, a norm
to which all state institutions and agencies must conform. All
state institutions and agencies, that also includes the army.And,
as Judge Barak and his colleagues pointed out on numerous occasions,
among these rights, and not the least of them, is the Freedom
of Conscience.
This does not mean, of course, that every
person can take any action which comes to mind, and claim that
it deserves to be defended by the Freedom of Conscience. It is
up to the person to prove that said action does indeed derive
from conscience--that is, from deep and fundamental convictions
about right and wrong, convictions so deep and fundamental that
by breaking them you would break the person. But once a person
proves this point--and it is my contention that the five young
men standing trial here did amply prove that their refusal to
enlist in an army of occupation does originate from such deeply
held convictions--then that person's act is protected as part
of the Freedom of Conscience.
In our legal system, no right is absolute--neither
the Freedom of Speech nor the Freedom of Movement, and also not
the Freedom of Conscience. When a person is suspected of a crime,
the police may arrest him and put him in a cell, which evidently
violates his liberty. But the police may not do so arbitrarily.
There is a law which defines exactly when they may arrest a person,
how long they can hold him and under what conditions. The same
with any other right. It may be infringed in order to preserve
another right or a value upheld by society--but as the Basic
Law states and the Supreme Court reiterated, such an infringement
of a basic right can only be justified when it is according to
a specific law and when there is a near certainty of its being
needed for the sake of preserving another value.
In the entire presentation made last
week by my colleague of the prosecution, not the slightest mention
was made of any of this. No reference to a law by which the military
authorities may infringe the Freedom of Conscience, no proof
that such infringement was needed with near certainty. It is
not the prosecutor's fault that such a huge gaping hole was left
in the argument which he presented. He did his work conscientiously,
faithfully representing the position and practice of the military
authorities. It is simply that those authorities have not yet
realized that a constitutional revolution has occurred, and that
it applies to them, too. Still, this hole does gape, and through
it the five accused must walk out free." Adv. Chenin sat
down.
"The court thanks the prosecution
and defence for the well-thought out presentations which they
made to this court. This is a very complicated case, which the
court will have to deliberate closely. Don't expect a verdict
in less than several weeks."
Adam Keller
is a member of the the Refuser Parents Forum.
Donations: Checks earmarked for "legal
aid" to New Profile, POB 6187 Ramat HaSharon 47271, Israel
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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