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Today's
Stories
November 11, 2003
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
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
for More Stories.
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Veteran's
Day Edition
November 11, 2003
Imperialism Starts
at Home
An
Interview with Stan Goff
By DEREK SEIDMAN
Left
Hook
Stan Goff knows better than most people about
what really goes on in the US military. He retired as a Master
Sergeant in 1996 after serving for 26 years, most of them with
the Special Forces, Delta Force, and as a military instructor
at West Point. In the process of his military career he was deployed
to Vietnam, South Korea, Colombia, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala,
Honduras, Panama, Peru, Venezuela, Somalia, and Haiti. He is
now an anti-imperialist activist and a member of the coordinating
committee of Bring
Them Home Now. He is the author of Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti, as
well as the forthcoming Full
Spectrum Disorder. He lives in Raleigh, NC.
Derek Seidman, an editor of the new radical
youth journal Left Hook,
interviewed Stan Goff last week.
Derek Seidman: We really appreciate
you doing this interview Stan. First, can you tell us a little
bit about yourself, your experience in the US armed forces, and
how you came to be a war resister?
Stan Goff:
I don't know if I'm a war resister as much as an anti-imperialist.
I mean, I see where they are the same thing on a contingent basis,
but I don't identify with those who simply oppose "war,"
generic, on moral grounds. I see war as a systemic outcome, but
feel we have to pay a lot of attention not only to the military
form of imperialism, but also to its economic, political, cultural,
and ideological forms. I see all these things as part of a unified
but nonlinear and dynamically evolving whole.
I joined the army in January 1970. I
won't detail the whole process, but one thing led to another,
and it became a career. I began in the infantry and drifted into
special operations. My first assignment was Vietnam. Then there
was a hiatus from conflict zones until the eighties, when I went
first to Guatemala, then six more conflict areas besides Vietnam
and Guatemala between 1983 and 1994. Working special ops in Central
America, I had the experience of working directly under embassy
supervision on a couple of missions, so I had a glimpse of foreign
policy that most soldiers don't get. That's when it began to
dawn on me that these military adventures and all these classified
operations were being driven by motives that were as much financial
as geo-strategic, and that there was some kind of symbiosis--which
I didn't clearly understand yet--between the financial and the
military.
I also became keenly aware of racism
all around me. I became interested in understanding it because,
besides being powerful, it is actually pretty complicated and
even mysterious. And I found myself becoming a proponent of allowing
women into combat arms--a nascent feminist current in my thinking.
These were the threads that began to unravel the old notions
and create the space for studying and seeking new ideas that
would better explain my own experience. By the nineties, I had
become interested in social theory, and by the time I left the
army in February 1996 I was involved with various political activists
on the left, where I was brought into a very lively culture of
organizing and debate.
My opposition to US military adventures
was a natural outcome of that. But I am seeing these adventures
not as a pacifist, but through the interpretive lenses I have
taken away from all that study, debate, and organizing, like
Marxism, feminism, deep ecology, and world systems theory. Each
of these perspectives yields a lot of useful information about
the inner dynamics of capitalism, patriarchal constructions of
sexuality and how they structure the totality of social relations,
the energetic and material limits to growth, the relationship
between material and social entropy, and US imperialism as a
global social structure.
(Read more about Stan's life and how
he came to oppose US imperialism at: http://www.indyweek.com/)
DS: If you were a soldier in Iraq
right now, what would be going through your head?
Goff:
Trick question. There are over 120,000 US soldiers in Iraq right
now, and each of them is unique in many respects. And at different
points in my own career, I might have responded differently depending
on what I was doing. As a grunt, or a support troop, I would
probably be pretty low. Special ops folks are usually kept busy
planning, planning, planning, or conducting some fairly sketchy
operations, like the Phoenix-style stuff that just got that SBS
troop killed, that are so all-occupying in the execution that
a lapse in professional focus can lapse your life.
DS: A lot of pundits argue that the
soldiers made a conscious decision to serve their country, and
that they need to live up to this responsibility and not criticize
what they're being made to do--it is, after all, the duty they
signed up for. What do you say to this?
Goff:
Horseshit! This is a big, smelly red herring. They made a conscious
decision alright, but not in a vacuum. The decision was to join
the military. But they were weighing their real options in the
real world when they made that decision, working off of limited
information, limited experience, Madison Avenue "Army of
One" sales pitches, and an economy that offers most people
a glorious career in serial shit retail jobs. That's the reason
rich frat boys like George Bush often don't do military service.
They have more options. The lack of options is a real thing that
can't be erased with a lot of abstracted, two-dimensional, libertarian,
we-are-all-free-agents nonsense.
And joining the military is a contractual
agreement that is circumscribed by law, not some holy vow to
surrender your brain. How is occupying Iraq "serving"
the United States? Unless we can define what the United States
is, it's pure demagogy. They were not ordered to Iraq by the
United States. They were ordered to Iraq by the Bush administration.
That's why this volunteer military thing is a red herring. The
decision didn't come from the troops. It came from the political
establishment. Whether they are "volunteer" or conscript
doesn't change that.
The question of criticism while on active
duty is a very nuanced legal question, but I would counsel those
on active duty to be cautious, or at least know what you're getting
into if you speak out. The military can always retaliate, even
when you are within your legal rights.
DS: Your son is stationed in Iraq.
What do you hear from him and others about what the situation
is like, both in general and for the soldiers in particular?
Goff:
My son has asked me not to speak for him publicly, and not to
pass along his comments made in private correspondence, and I
am going to respect that. He will be very happy to come home
and see his 11-month old baby, relax, make love, go to the refrigerator,
sleep in once in a while, and not have to carry a weapon.
Other correspondents are telling us that
morale is rock bottom, support is spotty, and they are beginning
to believe that all politicians are pathological liars.
DS: Can you tell us about Military
Families Speak Out? One of the main anti-war slogans is "Support
the troops--Bring them home now". What do you think about
the fact that the growing criticism of the war and occupation
has to do not with the fact that the US is doing something wrong,
immoral, and harmful for the world, but because our soldiers
are getting killed in doing it?
Goff:
That's the key to building a movement. The vast majority of people
are not motivated by abstractions. They are motivated by what
they can feel on their skin. The entry point for this movement
into the consciousness of new people is not through morality.
The ruling class has the best stage, the best sound, the best
lighting, the best scriptwriters, the best actors, and the best
broadcast ability to construct morality. Naturally, we fight
them tooth and nail on every single lie, but even the content
of our message is often lost, because of the WAYS that people
process messages, which has also been constructed by the ruling
class. The freshest stratum in any movement are those who are
there through trauma and fear. Soldiers getting killed is a very
serious thing, because these are our families. Our experience
in the Bring Them Home Now campaign is that in fighting to bring
troops home, this fresh group is exposed to a lot of new ideas,
and because they are in a painful space they are in a teachable
space. It doesn't take long for them, once they begin to question
the first motive to question all the motives. It's not as long
a step as people think from asking the first question to questioning
imperialism itself. I know. The truly surprising thing is how
incredibly thin the whole fabric of mystification is once it's
exposed to a little critique. Americans don't know how to critique,
and they are threatened by it. That's why the first step has
to be something more fundamental than analysis, like revulsion,
fear, and pain.
DS: Lastly, what do you think are
the immediate concrete tasks of the anti-war movement? How much
of this involves trying to reach out to the troops with their
growing demoralization and resentment?
Goff:
I've long been an advocate of reaching out to the military, but
not in the ham-handed way some people have tried. Saying goofy
shit like "Overthrow your officers!" is not going anywhere
now. The BTHN campaign is addressing real issues, with a lot
of emphasis on outreach to military families. Soldiers might
reactively engage in shouting matches with a stranger from the
movement, but they have respectful, thoughtful discussions with
spouses and parents and siblings. They also confide in them when
they themselves experience doubts.
Eventually, of course, I believe the
soldiers will have to overthrow some of their officers, but not
until we overthrow all of our bosses. The important thing for
revolutionaries--if that term is to mean anything other than
phrase-mongering and adventurism--is to build and maintain a
bridge with the military. The day will come when we will need
them, and they will need us.
I'm not sure we have just an anti-war
movement anymore. Since the full scale invasion, I think we have
three movements. One is a UN movement. Another is an anti-war
movement. The last is an anti-imperialist movement. The former
objected to the war on legalistic grounds, believing that the
US would be justified in escalating the attack on Iraqi sovereignty
with a Security Council resolution.
The UN movement wants to substitute a
UN military occupation for a US occupation as part of a return
to some mythical pre-Bush paradise of multilateralism. They profess
a caring for Iraqis, but fundamentally buy the whole "white
man's burden" theme that the Iraqis are incapable of self-government.
The anti-war movement is far more eclectic,
but they are those who are uncomfortable with the UN option except
as some short interim measure, and generally opposed to armed
conflict under any circumstances. This is the "Peace is
Patriotic" group, who still haven't quite grasped the essence
of American nationalism. There is a substantial section of this
stratum--not the hardcore religious pacifists--that can be won
over to an anti-imperialist position if they are provided a few
new analytical tools.
The anti-imperialist section is composed
broadly of "anti-globalization" folks, radical feminists,
Black and Brown nationalists, socialists, and anarchists.
If there is a strategic imperative for
us in the Euro-American metropolis', it is to consolidate this
anti-imperialist pole, then begin bringing in sections of the
anti-war movement, beginning with those who feel the system,
as it were, most directly on their skin. Poor people. Immigrants.
People of color. Women. But also white middle class who have
been downsized into the proletariat, so to speak. This entails
a massive popular education campaign, which is easy to say, and
hard as hell to do. Figuring out how to do that, however, is
absolutely imperative.
There is a right-pole to mirror our left-pole,
and it is white, middle-class, and armed to the teeth. When things
really start to slip, economically, and these folks avalanche
out of the middle class into the street, many of them will be
susceptible to the siren call of blood-and-soil nationalism,
and they'll look for scapegoats. I believe this is a real possibility
in the next few years, and that gives added urgency to our job
to fight for every soul.
Finally, imperialism starts at home.
Think of it as colonialism. That's not an analog, it's a real
thing. There are colonized nationalities here in the United States,
and their struggle for self-determination--which means political
power--must be seen as a key struggle for the whole movement.
The other struggle that has been perennially set on the back
burner during every upsurge of social unrest is the struggle
for self-determination by the largest colonized population in
our society: women. That is a mistake. In fact, this may be the
deepest of all our struggles, for lots of reasons I don't have
time to elaborate here. But more and more, I am coming to believe
that the struggle against patriarchy will be the linchpin of
any successful revolution in the future.
If you would like to give feedback to
Stan, he can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
You can read some of his writing here:
"Bring
'Em On?"
"The
So-Called Evidence is a Farce"
"The
Story we Hear on the News and Read in the Newspapers is simply
not believable"
Truthout Interview with Stan Goff
Derek Seidman,
23, is a co-editor of the radical youth journal Left
Hook. He is currently living in New York City. He looks
forward to your feedback at derekseidman@yahoo.com.
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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