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Today's
Stories
October
28, 2003
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
October
23, 2003
Diane
Christian
Ruthlessness
Kurt Nimmo
Criticizing Zionism
David Lindorff
A General Theory of Theology
Alan Maass
The Future of the Anti-War Movement
William
Blum
Imperial
Indifference
Stew Albert
A Memo
October
22, 2003
Wayne
Madsen
Religious
Insanity Runs Rampant
Ray McGovern
Holding
Leaders Accountable for Lies
Christopher
Brauchli
There's
No Civilizing the Death Penalty
Elaine
Cassel
Legislators
and Women's Bodies
Bill Glahn
RIAA
Watch: the New Morality of Capitalism
Anthony Arnove
An Interview with Tariq Ali
October 21, 2003
Uri Avnery
The
Beilin Agreement
Robert Jensen
The Fundamentalist General
David
Lindorff
War Dispatch from the NYT: God is on Our Side!
William S. Lind
Bremer is Deaf to History
Bridget
Gibson
Fatal Vision
Alan Haber
A Human Chain for Peace in Ann Arbor
Peter
Linebaugh
On the Bicentennial of the Hanging of Thomas Russell
October
20, 2003
Standard
Schaefer
Chile's
Failed Economy: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Chris
Floyd
Circus Maximus: Arnie, Enron and Bush Maul California
Mark Hand
Democrats Seek to Disappear Chomsky
& Nader
John &
Elaine Mellencamp
Peaceful
World
Elaine
Cassel
God's
General Unmuzzled
October
18 / 19, 2003
Robert
Pollin
Clintonomics:
the Hollow Boom
Gary Leupp
Israel, Syria and Stage Four in the Terror War
Saul Landau
Day of the Gropenfuhrer
Bruce Anderson
The California Recall
John Gershman
Bush in Asia: What a Difference a Decade Makes
Nelson P. Valdes
Bush, Electoral Politics and Cuba's "Illicit Sex Trade"
Kurt Nimmo
Shock Therapy and the Israeli Scenario
Tom Gorman
Al Franken and Al-Shifa
Brian
Cloughley
Public Propaganda and the Iraq War
Joanne Mariner
A New Way to Kill Tigers
Denise
Low
The Cancer of Sprawl
Mickey Z.
The Reverend of Doom
John Chuckman
US Missiles for Israeli Nukes?
George Naggiar
A Veto of Public Diplomacy
Alison
Weir
Death Threats in Berkeley
Benjamin Dangl
Bolivian Govt. Falling Apart
Ron Jacobs
The Politics of Bob Dylan
Fidel Castro
A Review of Garcia Marquez's Memoir
Adam Engel
I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert, Guthrie and Greeder
October
17, 2003
Stan Goff
Piss
On My Leg: Perception Control and the Stage Management of War
Newton
Garver
Bolivia
in Turmoil
Standard
Schaefer
Grocery Unions Under Attack
Ben Terrall
The Ordeal of the Lockheed 52
Ron Jacobs
First Syria, Then Iran
David
Lindorff
Michael
Moore Proclaims Mumia Guilty
October
16, 2003
Marjorie
Cohn
Bush
Gunning for Regime Change in Cuba
Gary Leupp
"Getting Better" in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
The US Press and Israel: Brand Loyalty and the Absence of Remorse
Rush Limbaugh
The 10 Most Overrated Athletes of All Time
Lenni
Brenner
I
Didn't Meet Huey Newton. He Met Me
Website of the Day
Time Tested Books
October
15, 2003
Sunil
Sharma / Josh Frank
The
General and the Governor: Two Measures of American Desperation
Forrest
Hylton
Dispatch
from the Bolivian War: "Like Animals They Kill Us"
Brian
Cloughley
Those
Phony Letters: How Bush Uses GIs to Spread Propaganda About Iraq
Ahmad
Faruqui
Lessons
of the October War
Uri Avnery
Three
Days as a Living Shield
Website
of the Day
Rank and File: the New Unity Partnership Document
JoAnn
Wypijewski
The
New Unity Partnership:
A Manifest Destiny for Labor
October 14, 2003
Eric Ridenour
Qibya
& Sharon: Anniversary of a Massacre
Elaine
Cassel
The
Disgrace That is Guantanamo
Robert
Jensen
What the "Fighting Sioux" Tells Us About White People
David Lindorff
Talking Turkey About Iraq
Patrick
Cockburn
US Troops Bulldoze Crops
VIPS
One Person Can Make a Difference
Toni Solo
The CAFTA Thumbscrews
Peter
Linebaugh
"Remember
Orr!"
Website
of the Day
BRIDGES
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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October
28, 2003
9/11 in Context
A
Marine Veteran's Perspective
By CHRIS WHITE
[Editors
Note: The following is an excerpt
of a speech White delivered on September 11, 2003 at Bethel College,
a Mennonite institution of higher learning in rural Kansas. --AC/JSC]
Two years ago today, everyone in this room felt
a sense of dread and fear perhaps unlike anything they could
have imagined. My heart still aches whenever I think about the
horrors that must have been felt by the victims of that day.
Something virtually unknown in this country is that Chileans
were also mourning on that day, but for a different reason. It
was twenty-eight years before to the day the U.S. government
assisted the military coup led by Augusto Pinochet that overthrew
the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, and led
to the systematic murder of 3,000 Chileans and the torture of
many thousands more, as well as a seventeen year dictatorship
that we whole-heartedly supported. We observe 9/11 as a date
to reflect on the wrongful deaths of 3,000 Americans, but why
do we not mourn those who died at the hands of Americans?
Places such as Iran, where the CIA engineered
a coup in 1953 that overthrew the democratically-elected Prime
Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, and installed the Shah and supported
his secret police force, SAVAK, who tortured and murdered thousands
of Iranians, do not warrant American tears. Nor do the countless
number of Filipinos, who suffered at the hands of the U.S.-backed
dictator, Ferdinand Marcos. The tens of thousands of Guatemalans
who were tortured, disappeared, and died at the hands of many
U.S.-supported dictators and puppet presidents in the four decades
that followed the 1954 CIA coup that overthrew the democratically-elected
presidency of Jacobo Arbenz, do not receive official American
sorrow. Nor do the 500,000 Indonesians or the 200,000 East Timorese
who were slaughtered by the U.S.-backed dictator, General Suharto,
after yet another CIA coup in 1965. The 2 million Vietnamese,
the 300,000 Laotians, and the 600,000 Cambodians whom the U.S.
military murdered in the 1960s and 1970s hold little place in
our collective consciousness outside of Hollywood, and there
exists no national day of remembrance for them like we have for
our 3,000 victims of 9/11. The silenced voices of tens of thousands
of Haitians killed by Marines in the early 1900s and at the hands
of the U.S.-backed Papa and Baby Doc Duvalier during the Cold
War, deserve no day of mourning in the country that applauded
their sorrow and held contempt for their pursuits of happiness.
When the people of Zaire tried their
hand at democracy in 1961, the CIA called for its death when
it supported Patrice Lumumba's assassination and then supported
the dictator Mobutu's reign of terror for the next three and
half decades. Yet, Mobutu's tens of thousands of victims are
virtually unknown in the U.S., nor are the many Zairians who
died at the hands of U.S.-hired South African mercenaries during
the 1960s, some of whom lynched their victims, because they were
opposing a dictatorship. The thousands of Peruvians who were
murdered by their U.S.-backed military in the 1980s receive no
official moments of silence on a sacred date, as does our 9/11.
The Dominican dictator, Rafael Trujillo, killed and tortured
tens of thousands of Haitians and Dominicans during his three-decades
of U.S. support, and yet we still have no day of mourning for
his victims because we encouraged their suffering. The tens of
thousands of Argentines, Brazilians, Uruguayans, Bolivians, Mexicans,
and Paraguayans who were murdered under U.S.-backed dictators
and de facto dictators during the Cold War only add to the list
of millions of direct victims of U.S. intervention who go unnoticed,
and in effect drop out of history. The hundreds of thousands
more who were murdered in Iran, Angola, Grenada, Cuba, Libya,
Nicaragua, Panama, El Salvador, Honduras, and Iraq receive no
official memorials or official moments of silence in the U.S.,
because we caused those deaths, and by definition
of U.S. foreign policy, our victims ALWAYS deserve what comes
to them.
As an American citizen whose tax dollars
have contributed toward some of the above atrocities carried
out in my name, I can not help but feel remorse. I am saddened
by the victims of 9/11/2001, but I am more saddened by the fact
that our nation as a whole has learned very little as a result
of the attacks. Instead of looking at the reasons why we were
attacked, we have declared war on everyone who hates us, hoping
to stamp out this hate with even more hate. It is a war of indeterminate
length that will cause an indeterminate amount of deaths, all
in the name of creating the illusion that we will somehow be
safer as a result. Funny how the atrocities we have carried out
in the past have never correlated with an enhanced amount of
actual safety for Americans, even though the flag of national
security has always been waved to promote such policies.
This summer, I actually got to visit
several of the above mentioned places where U.S. intervention
was supposed to lead to a safer America through supporting dictators.
In Chiapas and Central America, the hundreds of thousands of
deaths we helped cause were somehow supposed to have made us
safer, but I didn't see it. In Chiapas, Guatemala, El Salvador,
Honduras, and Nicaragua (the places I visited), School of the
Americas-trained officers, versed in the techniques of "low
intensity warfare" were given carte blanche in their efforts
to enforce obedience to dictatorships supported by our "democratic"
governments.
Although all of Central America intrigues
me greatly, El Salvador keeps calling me back for some reason.
You can feel a greater sense of sorrow in the air once you cross
the border into that country. One of San Salvador's streets became
darker as we walked past one of the infamous police stations,
once used to torture and disappear victims of our beloved dictators.
But the main reason I went to El Salvador was to visit the massacre
site at El Mozote, for it was there that in December of 1981,
U.S.-trained officers from the Atlacatl Battalion of the Salvadoran
military murdered between 800 and 1000 mostly women, children,
and aged people, as part of a scorched-earth policy carried out
in Morazan province. I visited this place to see first hand the
greatness of US foreign policy. The iron silhouette of a family
in front of hundreds of the victims names on boards hanging from
a brick wall would have given George W. Bush a sense of pride
of the sacrifice we were then willing to make for US national
security. The blown up homes, the bomb craters, the monument
over the remains of 132 of the victims, 121 of which were children,
the remaining bone chips and blood-caked clothing in the fields,
and the well in which 75 children were thrown to their deaths
by the American-trained Salvadoran officers, would have made
Don Rumsfeld realize more than ever that whatever price others
need to pay for our freedom, is worth it.
As I walked away from the well I noticed
a small film crew setting up in front of the silhouette and realized
that Rufina Amaya, the sole adult survivor of those days of horror
in El Mozote, was there. I got up the courage to introduce myself,
but what the hell could I say? My government trained the men
that ordered the deaths of her children and the rest of her village,
and she witnessed it all. On top of that, I am a former Marine.
On top of that, our government effectively rewarded the Salvadoran
military for the massacre of her village by increasing military
aid after the incident. I told her how sorry I was that my government
caused so much harm to her village and to her country.
So now we are in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and American soldiers are baffled by the fact that a lot of people
there don't like them and they can't figure out why the rest
of the world opposed this last war (save a few dozen weak-spined
leaders who needed the dough). They, just like I used to be,
think that we would never do wrong on purpose, that our government
may have been wrong with the evidence and such to go to war,
but that in the end, we always had the best of intentions. I
don't believe the Bush administration has the intention of fighting
terror, for we are the ones killing thousands of innocent people,
just as we have been doing for many decades all over the world.
But let me make one thing clear: although I have been accused
of it many times, I do not hate America. I fear for it. And although
I feel sorrow for the victims of 9/11/2001, I feel that the lives
of each of the victims of U.S. aggression deserves as much attention,
but their deaths are not mourned by America, and until they are
mourned by us and until we start caring about the people we kill,
we have reason to fear for the future. Thank you."
At the end of the speech, there was
the requisite hateful response. This time it was a bit different,
for one of the women who confronted me had lost her brother in
Iraq, fighting for my freedom. She said something like this:
"I would like to say that I am totally offended by everything
you have said here today. My brother died fighting for your freedom
in Iraq, and to think that people like you hate him and hate
America makes me so angry and so sad." Again, what could
I say? As with Rufina, I told her how sorry I was that my government
caused so much harm to her.
Chris White
is a former Marine Sergeant who is currently working on his PhD
in history at the University of Kansas. He served in the infantry
from 1994-98, in Diego Garcia, Camp Pendleton, CA, Okinawa, Japan,
and Doha, Qatar. He is also a member of Veterans for Peace. He
can be reached at: juliopac@swbell.net
Weekend
Edition Features for Oct. 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
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