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Today's
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Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
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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
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Weekend
Edition
December 13 / 14, 2003
Chickenhearts at Notre
Dame
The
Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli Connection
By BILL and KATHLEEN
CHRISTISON
It is wide open now. Israelis are training Americans
at Fort Bragg on their well tested techniques for carrying out
targeted--and of course extrajudicial--assassinations. Americans
in Iraq are copying this and all the other wretchedly cruel,
unjust (and failed) Israeli occupation tactics in the West Bank
and Gaza, tactics that the U.S. through its massive aid enables
and encourages Israel to pursue. It is impossible to exaggerate
the stupidity and just plain evil of the Bush administration
in transferring such copycat policies to Iraq, at a time when
hatred of U.S. policies is already rising daily around the world.
The training of assassination teams is only one of many manifestations
of the United States' "Israeli connection."
At the same time, almost all influential
individuals and groups in the U.S. political landscape still
shy away from discussing the degree to which this Israeli connection
has been a major factor in determining the entire complex of
U.S. policies on Iraq and the Middle East since September 11.
In the eyes of most Americans, the correctness of the ever stronger
ties between the right-wing governments of the United States
and Israel is simply not to be questioned. (If you do question
these ties, you must be prepared to deal either with suspicions
of  anti-Semitism that may be
directed at you, or, more likely, with suggestions that
you are simply "too far out" of the mainstream and
therefore deserve no further consideration. In the latter case,
an unspoken motive of your interlocutors is often that they
fear being charged with anti-Semitism, or with being "self-hating
Jews," if they seem to agree with you.)
Here are a couple of examples that we
have observed in recent weeks.
In the summer of 2003, we were asked,
along with several dozen other people around the country, to
participate in and lend our names to a study entitled Toward
a More Secure America: Grounding U.S. Policy in Global Realities.
The report was a joint project of the Fourth Freedom Forum and
the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at
the University of Notre Dame. We did participate initially and
gave the drafters some thoughts on what we believed should be
in the report. When we eventually received a near-final draft,
we sent in a comment that (1) the paper failed to devote any
meaningful attention to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and
the U.S. role therein as a critical issue in future U.S. relations
with the Islamic world; (2) this was a serious flaw in the paper;
and (3) we could not sign off on the paper without major changes
on this and several other subjects, which we specified. The drafters
would not or could not accept many of our proposed changes, and
we ended our involvement with the group.
The final paper has just been published.
[See http://www.SecureAmerica.US for the full text.] The
executive summary--the only part many readers will read--contains
no reference to the Israel-Palestine issue at all and has only
a very general one-line admonition that the U.S. should try to
"reduce the root causes driving people to radical violence."
In the body of the report, the paper states on page 5 of the
20-page text that "facilitating a just peace in the Middle
East" is "among the policies that can mitigate anti-American
resentment and enhance global security." On page 15 the
paper states that "a key priority is and must remain U.S.
support for a genuine peace process in the Middle East that provides
security, justice, and economic opportunity for both sides."
This is boilerplate; because they are
meaningless, such generalizations have the advantage of being
unobjectionable to pro-Israel lobbies in the U.S. The word "Palestinian"
does not appear anywhere in the paper. "Palestine"
appears only once, in a simple reference to the conflict between
Israel and Palestine. Nowhere can one find even a mention of
the possibility that massive U.S. support and aid to Israel might
be one of the factors encouraging future terrorism against the
United States and its allies. Whatever one's views on the need
for, and the value to the U.S. of, such support and aid to Israel,
doesn't the subject deserve some discussion in a report entitled
Toward a More Secure America? But such discussion is pretty
much taboo in the American foreign policy establishment these
days.
The second example involves not the staid
establishment but the U.S. peace movement. (The tribulations
of the peace movement over the Israeli connection and how to
deal with it are treated in considerable detail in several chapters
of the new book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism, edited
by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.) In this case, the
two of us were asked to participate as interviewees in the film
and video Uncovered: The Whole Truth About the Iraq War,
recently released by Moveon.org and The Center for American Progress
in association with Artists United. We agreed to do so and were
interviewed for over an hour. But only one of us actually appears
in the final video, and only for a few seconds. We assume that
most of the footage of us ended up on the cutting room floor
because we had discussed at length the Israeli connection in
the U.S. war against Iraq.
Through interviews with several dozen
people interspersed with film clips of senior officials doing
their dirty work, the video gives a fascinating account--guaranteed
to hold your attention--of the lies and distortions used by the
Bush administration to mislead the nation into the war. It does
a superb job in demonstrating how administration leaders from
Bush to Cheney to Powell to Rumsfeld to Rice used the issue of
weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as the main pretext to generate
popular support in the U.S. for the war. The film is a high-quality
production that everyone should see.
But--this piece of art is subtitled The
Whole Truth About the Iraq War, and it by no means lives
up to that billing. The reason is that the Israeli connection
is nowhere mentioned. Once again, the subject is taboo.
Although the war was sold to Congress
and the public on the basis of the WMD issue, many of us believed
for months before the war that the actual reasons the Bush administration
invaded Iraq were the U.S. drive for global domination, oil--and
Israel. Cheney, Rumsfeld, and neocons in the administration,
some of whom quite clearly have displayed loyalties toward Likud
governments in Israel, have strongly supported war with Iraq
at least since the mid-1990s, and their reasons for doing so
have included the strengthening of Israel's hegemony in the Middle
East. A video that claims to present the entire truth about the
Iraq war should at least include some discussion of the relationship
of Israel to that war. Even if one disagrees with the judgment
that key U.S. supporters of Israel's Likud government played
a significant role in getting the U.S. into this war, the evidence
is massive that most people in most Arab nations believe
Israel to be one of the reasons the U.S. initiated the war. That
alone should be reason enough to have included some discussion
of the issue in this video.
Some might argue that constraints of
length (the video is 56 minutes long) required that the producers
deal only with the most important issues, and that anything related
to Israel was of less importance. This is merely a convenient
rationalization. As on many other occasions, it is too easy to
sweep the Israeli-Palestinian conflict under the carpet in order
to achieve greater apparent unity in the peace movement. Both
right-wing Americans and right-wing Israelis may believe that
the fate of the Palestinians is not the most important issue
facing their governments' policies in the Middle East today.
But in fact it is. Palestinians will not go the way of Native
Americans. Nor will they ever disappear into other Arab lands.
They are simply too numerous, and their numbers are growing.
Their cause is too important to other Arabs and Muslims, most
of whom care deeply about Palestinian oppression at Israel's
hands.
Contrary to the hopes of the Bush and
Sharon administrations, it will not be possible for them to so
"transform" the politics and societies of the Middle
East that hatred of U.S. and Israeli policies, and terrorism
against these two states and their few remaining allies, will
simply fade away. It is the policies of the U.S. and Israel themselves
that will have to change, if the world is to have any chance
of peace and stability in the next few decades.
To repeat, these points, or at least
discussion of them, should be part of every study or video or
any other serious analysis of what is going on in the Middle
East today. It is vital that we break through the taboos, which
have, if anything, grown stronger in recent months.
Bill Christison
joined the CIA in 1950, and served on the analysis side of the
Agency for 28 years. From the early 1970s he served as National
Intelligence Officer (principal adviser to the Director of Central
Intelligence on certain areas) for, at various times, Southeast
Asia, South Asia and Africa. Before he retired in 1979 he was
Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis,
a 250-person unit.
Kathleen Christison also worked in the CIA, retiring in 1979. Since
then she has been mainly preoccupied by the issue of Palestine.
She is the author of Perceptions
of Palestine and The
Wound of Dispossession.
They are also contributors to CounterPunch's
hot new book: The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
The Christison's can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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