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Today's
Stories
November 7, 2003
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
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November
8, 2003
The Nuptials of Boykin
and Wolfowitz
The
Bride Wore Black
By SAUL LANDAU
"This is a first," a colleague
moaned, claiming that the country has fallen into the hands of
a religious cult. "Look," he directed me, "at
the crusade-like rhetoric emanating from high circles about the
Iraq effort, while we get dosed with supposedly Christian doctrines
of enforcement from Attorney General John Ashcroft." He
meant the 2001 order from the AG to cover a bare breast on a
statue in the Department of Justice as well as his Puritanical
diktats that decry abortion and exalt the death penalty.
"Look at history," I reminded
my colleague. "Until the late 17th Century, a theocracy
ruled Massachusetts Bay Colony. Those Puritans believed in witches
and the Devil. They also fostered aggressive conversion of the
heathen, so that all might hear the `revealed word.' God had
instructed them to build a `Zion in the Wilderness,' so He could
issue in the Kingdom of the Apocalypse, or what the current holy
rollers call The Rapture. The Puritan mission to create a virtuous
society worthy of God's redemption placed an urgent burden on
their pious shoulders. Since God had chosen these Puritans to
do His mission, the stoic New Englanders could not afford to
indulge in sentimentality or other forms of weakness. They tried
to eliminate the Devil's presence by killing his witches after
fair trials of course.
"Today," I argued, "the
religious or ideological descendents of the Puritan elite, the
modern crusaders, repeat similar messages from the pulpit and
even from the Pentagon." I offered as an illustration Deputy
Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence General William G.
Boykin, who called a dark spot on a photograph in Mogadishu,
Somalia `a manifestation of evil.'
In speeches Boykin refers to the "Christian
army," waging holy war against the "idol" of Islam's
false God, and the "spiritual battle" against "a
guy named Satan" who "wants to destroy us as a nation,
and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army." This does
not sound like the emissions coming from the mouth of rational
Jewish neo conservatives like Deputy  Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. With
completely secular logic, Wolfy explained to Vanity Fair (May
2003) that "For bureaucratic reasons, we settled on one
issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason
everyone could agree on."
Now, imagine an intellectual marriage
between these two men! Does it seem bizarre that ultra zany Christian
theologians wearing military uniforms marry Jewish neo-con ideologues?
In the 21st Century, this union has not replaced the family,
but it has invaded the space traditionally occupied by foreign
policy strategists.
One could see the invasion of Iraq as
the nuptial ceremony for this bizarre matrimony. The war itself,
over in weeks, symbolized the honeymoon period when both sides
of this crusading union talked about "liberating Iraq"
and bringing democracy to the Middle East." This act of
"liberation" destroyed with missiles and bombs Iraq's
infrastructure. The neo-con/Christian fundamentalist merger received
the blessings of President George W. Bush when he declared victory
who could forget his jet landing on the USS Abraham Lincoln?
In his May 1 self-congratulatory speech he also indirectly applauded
those who had brought him to lead the country into a pre-emptive
attack against Iraq.
Then, even as US troops began to rebuild
Iraq, the consequences of an unjust war began to intrude. The
very neo-cons and Christians who had predicted that Iraqis would
welcome our soldiers as liberators, had to face the harsh truth
that many Iraqis deeply resented the invasion and the occupation
of their country. By the end of October more than 200 US soldiers
have died, more than a thousand wounded, more than a dozen suicides;
thousands more have fallen seriously ill and been evacuated.
Bush's declaration of victory might even have echoed harshly
in the ears of Wolfowitz himself as mortars struck the hotel
that lodged him in Baghdad where he had been busy issuing optimistic
statements. As Ramadan commenced at the very end of October,
suicide bombers struck four targets in Baghdad and hit other
Iraqi targets as well. Wolfowitz looked shaken. The fanatics
on the enemy side seemed even more committed than Wolfy and his
new theological partner.
The peace and order promised by the president
as his newly married advisers assured him did not materialize.
Instead, the numbers of attacks on US occupation forces, including
those by suicide bombers, has grown. The army's morale has declined.
A Member of Congress told me that National Guardsmen from his
district call him regularly to complain about as many as twenty
attacks a day on US patrols. Guardsmen's wives also complain,
he said, that their husbands did not join the National Guard
to become an occupation force in a country whose people didn't
want them.
The Member went on to describe the condition
of some of the wounded he had visited in a Washington DC military
hospital. "They have lost legs, arms and eyes," he
said. "Some of these poor young men told me that their humvees
didn't have proper protection against explosives or rocket propelled
grenades, but had only canvas flaps. The Administration spends
our money freely on contracts to Halliburton and Bechtel, but
they don't seem to be able to give our guys proper protection."
The Congressman said that only recently had the occupying troops
received Kevlar vests.
Bush has sworn to use them to bring order
to Iraq, despite the Administration's stinginess on providing
soldiers protective material. So, ironically, the very agency
and methods that destroyed Iraq, will now rebuild it: killing
and intimidating to install order and democracy very different
from Saddam Hussein's methods!
But the Administration continues to boast
of its progress in Iraq and label critics as party poopers. For
upbeat news, watch Fox or CNN. The bad news, the human and material
price of occupying a country whose people resent the occupiers,
seeps out in daily reports of casualties: dead, wounded, sick
(physically and mentally) and suicides.
The Bushies count on their New Crusaders
as a counterweight. One example of the new imperialists, Reverend
Bobby Welch, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach,
Florida, invites his colleagues on an April 22-23 visit to The
John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg
"to share an experience with the Green Berets."
If your mind flashes back to the original
crusades, you've had an insight. "It is believed by you,
me and others," Welch extols, "that we must find a
group of men who are warriors of FAITH, pastors who have the
guts to lead this nation to Christ and revival."
The Special Forces will demonstrate for
the visiting clergy "today's war fighting weapons,"
("live fire/real bullets"). They'll watch, hand-to-hand
combat and discover how "Special Forces attack the enemy
inside buildings. The trip includes a visit with Major General
William Boykin, who had collaborated previously with Reverend
Welch. At the time Boykin commanded the special warfare center
(<www.thenation.com> 4-9-03).
Try and picture New Crusaders like Reverend
Welch at the wedding when the brainy Wolfowitz mated with the
muscular Boykin. The neo cons who fed ideologically at the trough
of the Heritage Foundation and founded The Project for a New
American Century (PNAC) wanted "to promote American global
leadership." Among those who founded this 1997 Project one
finds VP Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and
Wolfowitz.
While Boykin rants about Muslim devils
Wolfowitz seeks to convert the United States into the world's
permanent and only superpower. No nation, backward and hostile
or advanced and friendly could challenge US supremacy. To achieve
this, Wolfowitz advocated preemptive military actions "when
collective action cannot be orchestrated." Since 1998, Wolfowitz
has called for the removal of Saddam Hussein from power by force
as a major goal of policy.
Wolfowitz foresaw that such a transformation
of policy from alliances to uni-literalism would encounter resistance
from Congress, save for "a catastrophic and catalyzing event
- like a new Pearl Harbor." The events of 9/11 served the
purpose. But he and his fellow neo cons needed a man to realize
their crusade on the one hand and a wider pulpit from which the
new word would issue forth.
And Boykin offered the Christian soldiers
the reason to support Emperor Bush. "Why is this man in
the White House?" Boykin asked rhetorically. "The majority
of Americans did not vote for him," he accurately stated.
"He's in the White House because God put him there for a
time such as this."
Fellow fundamentalist Jerry Falwell backed
Boykin. He told an October 22, 2003 CNN "Crossfire"
audience that "God rules in the affairs of men. And history
would support that." Not only did God choose Bush (43) but
"we needed Bill Clinton, because we turned our backs on
the lord and we needed a bad president to get our attention again."
Falwell evokes images of Cotton Mather's
Church in the 17th Century. The Puritan salvation mission might
have contained more sophisticated theology than that provided
by the Boykins and Falwells, but it's the same hunt for witches
and Devils. As the sage once said, "the first time around
tragedy, then again, farce." Unfortunately, we're living
in the second go around. So, get off your butts unless you want
the Boykin-Wolfowitz marriage to generate real offspring.
Saul Landau
is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. He teaches at
Cal Poly Pomona University. For Landau's writing in Spanish visit:
www.rprogreso.com.
His new book, PRE-EMPTIVE
EMPIRE: A GUIDE TO BUSH S KINGDOM, has just been published
by Pluto Press. He can be reached at: landau@counterpunch.org
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 25 / 26, 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
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