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July
3, 2003
Stan
Goff
"Bring 'Em On?": a Former
Special Forces Soldier Responds to Bush's Invitation for Iraqis
to Attack US Troops
David
Lindorff
Outlawing Subversives: Hong Kong
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Chuckman
Lessons from the American Revolution
Jackson
Thoreau
New Far-Right Scheme: Impeach Supreme Court Justices
Patrick
W. Gavin
The Meaning of Gettysburg
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July 2, 2003
Diane
Christian
Good Killing and Bad Killing
Richard
Falk
After Iraq, Does UN War Prevention Have a Future?
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Bush Administration: Causing Repetitive Stress
Justin
Podur
Uribe's Onslaught Across Colombia
Reuven
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Prosecuting Ben-Artzi, the Refusenik
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Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/2
July
1, 2003
Sasan
Fayamanesh
Weapon of Choice: Nukes, Israel and
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Elaine
Cassel
Sex and the Supreme Moralizer: Scalia
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Susan
Block
A Love Supreme: Our Assholes Belong
to Ourselves
Bill
Glahn
RIAA Watch: No, No Bono
David Lindorff
Weapons in Search of a Name
Gary
Leupp
Occupation, Resistance and the Plight of the GIs
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/1
June
30, 2003
Karyn
Strickler
The Do-Nothings: an Exposé
of Progressive Politics in America
Col. Dan
Smith
The Occupation of Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire
Tim
Wise
Race and Destruction in Black and White
Neve Gordon
The Roadmap and the Wall
Chris
Floyd
The Revelation of St. George: "God Told Me to Strike Saddam"
Elaine
Cassel
Kentucky Woman
Uri
Avnery
Hope in Dark Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/30
Website
of the Day
Bush El Hombre
June
28 / 29, 2003
M.
Shahid Alam
Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
Democracy's Future: From the Polls or the Populace?
Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
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Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
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Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
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Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
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Poets'
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Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
June
27, 2003
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Leopold
CIA: Seven Months Prior to 9/11 Iraq
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David
Vest
Supreme Silence: Bush's Bunker-Hunker
David
Lindorff
The Catch and Release of "Comical
Ali"
Ray McGovern
Cheney, Forgery and the CIA
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/26
Website
of the Day
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June
26, 2003
Sen.
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The Road of Cover-Up is a Road to Ruin
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Leopold
Wolfowitz Instructed the CIA to Investigate
Hans Blix
Paul
de Rooij
Ambient Death in Palestine
Chris Floyd
Mass Graves and Burned Meat in Bush's New Iraq
Elaine
Cassel
Wolfowitz as Lord High Executioner
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Hull
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Uri
Avnery
The Best Show in Town
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
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June
25, 2003
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Jackson
Buffalo Cops Wage War on Pedal Pushers
Mickey
Z.
The New Dark Ages
David Lindorff
Indonesia's War on Journalists
Dan
Bacher
Butterflies and Farmworkers Confront USDA and Riot Cops
Adam Federman
"Success is Not the Issue Here"
Elaine
Cassel
"Ain't No Justice": Fed Judge Quits, Assails Sentencing
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Bill Kauffman
My America vs. the Empire
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/25
Website
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You Are Being Watched:
Elevator Moods
June
24, 2003
Elaine
Cassel
Supreme Indemnity
Holocaust Denial at the High Court
Roya
Monajem
A Message from Tehran: Is It Worth
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John
Chuckman
The Real Clash of Civilizations
David Lindorff
WMD Damage Control at the Times
Steve
Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/24
June
23, 2003
Marc
Pritzke
Washington Lied: an Interview with
Ray McGovern
Conn
Hallinan
The Consistency of Sharon
Wayne Madsen
Commercials, Disney & Amistad
Edward
Said
The Meaning of Rachel Corrie
Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 6/23
June
21 / 22, 2003
Alexander
Cockburn
My Life as a Rabbi
William
A. Cook
The Scourge of Hopelessness
Standard
Schaefer
The Wages of Terror: an Interview with R.T. Naylor
Ron Jacobs
US Prisons as Strategic Hamlets
Harry
Browne
The Pitstop Ploughshares
Lawrence
Magnuson
WMD: The Most Dangerous Game
Harold
Gould
Saddam and the WMD Mystery
David Krieger
10 Reasons to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
Avia
Pasternak
The Unholy Alliance in the Occupied Territories
CounterPunch
Summer Reading:
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Maria
Tomchick
Danny Goldberg's Imaginary Kids
Adam Engel
The Fat Man in Little Boy
Poets'
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Guthrie, Albert & Hamod
June 20, 2003
Walter
Brasch
Down on Our Knees
Robert
Meeropol
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Russell
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Grannies and Baby Bells
Norman
Madarasz
Pierre Bourgault: the Life of a
Quebec Radical
Gary
Leupp
Bush on "Revisionist Historians"
Steve
Perry
Bush's Lies
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Corrie
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Elaine
Cassel
Civil Liberties
Watch
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Guerrin
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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
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July
4, 2003
Happy Birthday, America
227 Years of
Warfare
By JOHN STANTON
"Great power imposes the obligation
of exercising restraint, and we did not live up to this obligation."
That according to Leo Szilard, the Manhattan Project physicist
commenting on the United States and its decision in August of
1945 to obliterate non-military targets Hiroshima (70,000 dead
instantly with 210,000 total deaths) and Nagasaki (40,000 dead
instantly with 200,000 total deaths) in Japan. When the United
States of America takes its place in the graveyard of empires,
its tombstone will display Szilard's words alongside the inscription,
"Born in violence, practiced violence and came to a violent
end." Americans fancy their society as a peaceful, freedom
loving enterprise when the reality is that Americans are brutally
competitive and adversarial in every aspect of their lives. And
they are warlike to the core. Is it any wonder that in America,
the easiest act for the US government to carry out is war?
As Americans prepare to celebrate their
Independence Day this July 4, 2003, with a grandiose glorification
of ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan-and wars from days past--it's
worth remembering those millions of civilians and/or non-combatants
who have died at the hands of unconstrained and psychopathic
American power. The US government has a long history of reengineering
and downsizing populations that get in the way of freedom loving
Americans and their business interests. Each and every American
has the blood of the world on his/her hands. And freedom is going
to get even bloodier as history, it turns out, is an excellent
guide.
Kill 'Em All
Prior to those fateful days in August
of 1945, the US Target Committee met in May of 1945 and discussed
the need for following up those two days of nuclear infamy with
B-29 incendiary raids. "The feasibility of following the
raid by an incendiary mission was discussed. This has the great
advantage that the enemies' fire fighting ability will probably
be paralyzed by the gadget [atomic bomb] so that a very serious
conflagration should be capable of being started." The US
Target Committee, anxious to collect data on the "gadget's"
performance recommended a 24 hour waiting period before letting
loose the B-29's to vaporize any humans or structures that might
have survived the "gadget's" output.
In February of 1945 in Dresden, Germany,
the United States--and its coalition partner Great Britain--were
engaged in the firebombing slaughter of scores of German civilians
and refugees fleeing the Soviet Army's advance. According to
rense.com. "Dresden was a hospital city for wounded soldiers.
Not one military unit, not one anti-aircraft battery was deployed
in the city. Together with the 600, 000 refugees from Breslau,
Dresden was filled with nearly 1.2 million people. Churchill
had asked for "suggestions on how to blaze 600,000 refugees.
He wasn't interested in how to target military installations
60 miles outside of Dresden. More than 700,000 phosphorus bombs
were dropped on 1.2 million people. One bomb for every 2 people.
The temperature in the center of the city reached 1600 degrees
centigrade. More than 260,000 bodies and residues of bodies were
counted. But those who perished in the center of the city could
not be traced. Approximately 500,000 children, women, the elderly,
wounded soldiers and the animals of the zoo were slaughtered
in one nightOthers hiding below ground died. But they died painlessly--they
simply glowed bright orange and blue in the darkness. As the
heat intensified, they either disintegrated into cinders or melted
into a thick liquid--often three or four feet deep in spots."
Writing in World War II magazine, Christopher
Lew points out that the Americans incinerated Tokyo, Japan in
March of 1945 via firebombing raids killing 100,000 civilians.
The US government engaged in military campaigns such as Operation
Starvation meant to deny food supplies to the population. Every
city in Japan was targeted in a ruthless, murderous and calculated
manner. Yet, the Emperor of Japan's residence was considered
off limits by US commanders (the rationale being he would be
an asset in the post-war era "For three hours over Tokyo,
334 B-29s unleashed their cargo [including napalm] upon the dense
city below. The fires raged out of control in little less than
30 minutes, aided by a 28-mph wind. Even the water in the rivers
reached the boiling point. The fire was so intense that it created
updrafts that tossed the gigantic B-29s around as if they were
feathers. Officially the Japanese listed 83,793 killed and 40,918
injured. A total of 265,171 buildings were destroyed, and 15.8
square miles of the city were burned to ashes. It was the greatest
urban disaster, man-made or natural, in all of history."
The slaughter of the Japanese and their cities was unrelenting
and so insidiously effective that the US military ran out of
targets.
Of course, the US government has never
been content just to annihilate those pesky civilians in other
lands. There's always work to be done right here in the United
States. Whether rounding up Arabs in 2003 and locking them away
or engaging in genocide in the 1800's, the US government has
a long history of reengineering and downsizing populations that
get in the way of freedom loving Americans. For example, in 1830
the Congress of the United States passed the Indian Removal Act
according to understandingprejudice.org. President Andrew Jackson
quickly signed the bill into law. In the summer of 1838, US Army
General Winfield Scott led his men in the invasion of the Cherokee
Nation. In one of many bloody episodes in US history, men, women,
and children were taken from their land, herded into makeshift
forts with minimal facilities and food, then forced to march
a thousand miles--some made part of the trip by boat in equally
horrible conditions. Under the indifferent US Army commanders,
an estimated 5,000 native Americans would die on the Trail of
Tears.
The Tradition Continues:
Make War Not Love
Thanks to its penchant for war and belief
in its divine invincibility, worldwide polls now show that the
United States is a reviled nation. Little surprise there. Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shrugs off the deaths of 10,000 civilians
in Iraq and Afghanistan. He is equally without pity for the American
troops now dying each day in both failed military campaigns.
Attorney General John Ashcroft-who now likes to be addressed
as General Ashcroft-presides over an American justice system
which has stripped away the rights of all Americans to due process
and other rights formerly guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.
In the US, accused serial killers and rapists have more access
to legal assistance than an individual suspected of terrorism.
And for the first time, America has more of its citizens incarcerated
and executed than any nation on the planet. "With liberty
and justice for all" seems meaningless as the United States
flaunts the fact that it runs a death camp in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba, and that its foreign and domestic policies include torture,
assassination, and eavesdropping on any person it deems a threat
to national security.
America has been at war since 1775. Indeed,
the US has never been at peace. The following are considered
major conflicts: Revolutionary War (1775-1783), War of 1812 (1812-1815),
Mexican War (1846-1848), Civil War (1861-1865), Spanish American
War (1898), World War I (1917-1918), World War II (1941-1945),
Korean War (1950-1953), Vietnam War (1964-1972), and the
Gulf War I (1990-1991). And that list excludes the invasion of
Panama, Grenada, Serbia, Gulf War II and a whole slew of covert
actions that overthrew governments the world over. The future
holds Iran, North Korea, Syria, Colombia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and,
arguably, the entire planet.
Unfortunately, war is the defining characteristic
of the US government and a majority of its people. American freedom
depends on war and their economic system demands it. "Under
capitalism, corporations that produce weapons make huge profits
from these weapons of war and therefore are happy both to prepare
for war and to engage in war. You prepare for war, you have all
these government contracts, and make all this money, and you
engage in war and you use up all these products and you have
to replace them," according to Howard Zinn.
Is there any hope of breaking away from
a bloody history celebrated mindlessly each July 4th? Will Americans
ever live up to the ideals set forth in the US Constitution?
Can they break the habit of war?
"War has always diminished our freedom,"
says Zinn. "When our freedom has expanded, it has not come
as a result of war or of anything the government has done but
as a result of what citizens have done. The best test of that
is the history of black people in the United States, the history
of slavery and segregation. It wasn't the government that initiated
the movement against slavery but white and black abolitionists.
It wasn't the government that initiated the battle against racial
segregation in the 1950s and 1960s, but the movement of people
in the South. It wasn't the government that gave the people the
freedom to work eight hours a day instead of twelve hours a day.
It was working people themselves who organized into unions, went
out on strike, and faced the police. The government was on the
other side; the government was always in support of the employers
and the corporations.
The freedom of working people, the freedom
of black people has always depended on the struggles of people
themselves against the government. So, if we look at it historically,
we certainly cannot depend on governments to maintain our liberties.
We have to depend on our own organized efforts."
Only the American people can stop war.
What will they do? The world waits.
John Stanton is the author (along with
Wayne Madsen) of America's Nightmare: The Presidency of George
Bush II, May 2003, available at booksurge.com and barnesandnoble.com.
Weekend Edition
Features
M.
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Bernard Lewis: Scholarship or Sophistry?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Meet Steven Griles: Big Oil's Inside
Man
Laura
Carlsen
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Alan Maass
You Call These Democrats an Alternative?
C.Y.
Gopinath
Bush and Kindergarten
Noah Leavitt
Bush, the Death Penalty and International Law
Joanne
Mariner
Rehnquist Family Values
Ignacio
Chapela
Tenure, Censorship and Biotech at Berkeley
Bob
Scowcroft
Bush's Squeeze on Organic Farmers
Jon Brown
Tom Delay: "I am the Government"
Kam
Zarrabi
Keep Your Hands Off Iran, Please!
Ron Jacobs
Big Bill Broonzy's Conversation with the Blues
Julie
Hilden
Fear Factor: Art, Terror and the First Amendment
Adrien
Rain Burke
The Anarchists' Wedding Guide
Adam
Engel
US Troops Outta Times Square
Poets'
Basement
Witherup, Guthrie, Albert, Hamod
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