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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 7, 2003

Surely It Can't Get Any Worse

Ten Days That Gorked the World

By DAVID VEST

"Have you seen Dignity?"
-- Bob Dylan

"Qui peut dire?"
-- Francoise Hardy

These are the times that try most anything. You think it can't get any worse, but somehow it always does. The past ten days or so have outdone themselves. I swear to the San Diego Chicken, an American Voltaire could not have made this stuff up.

Mohammed al-Rehaief, the Iraqi lawyer who reportedly took great risks to help free Jessica Lynch, visited Pvt. Lynch's hometown and was told by her lawyer that the woman whose life he may have saved was "too busy" to receive him.

Meanwhile, California Gov.-Elect Arnold Schwarzenegger is hiring a private investigator to look into allegations that he groped a number of women. What are we to believe? That Schwarzenegger is determined, by God, to find out once and for all whether he ever groped anyone? Think that would fly? With California, all things are possible. Or could it be that he is actually investigating the women who have come forward and reported the allegations? Heaven forbid that anyone should feel "intimidated" by this investigation.

Perhaps Arnold is like unto Bonzi Wells, of the Portland Trail Blazers basketball team, who says he cannot recall doing anything like giving the finger to a paying customer, even though he was caught on camera, but that he was "probably wrong" if he did any such thing, but then again he "blacks out sometimes" (wink wink).

Wells actually did wink at reporters, on camera. It is not known whether Arnold winked at any of the women who say he groped them. Perhaps the "investigation" will shed light.

Far from California, President Bush described Mississippi Gov.-Elect Haley Barbour as the anti-Arnold, "a man of faith and values" who "honors his family" and "treasures his relationship with the Almighty."

Almighty Bush, that is.

Some of the more spiritual "values" displayed by Barbour in his successful race included using the Confederate Battle Flag in his campaign literature and allowing his photo to be displayed on the home page of the openly-racist Council of Conservative Citizens.

No sooner had the networks called the race for Barbour than Democratic presidential frontrunner Howard Dean announced that he, too, wanted the votes of white Southerners with Confederate flags on their pickups.

You knew he was going to veer to the right, of course you did, admit it. You just thought he'd lock up the nomination first. Maybe he thinks he's already done it.

CBS cancelled plans to run a docubiomentary on the Reagans. Demonstrating a perfect understanding of where it now stood with regard to the word "credibility," CBS assured us with a robotically straight face that the decision to spike the program had NOTHING, nothing WHATEVER, nothing at ALL to do with pressure from the political right. It was just that the portrayal lacked "balance."

You have to go back to the time a hack political appointee who was also a religious nut stuck the words "In God We Trust" on our money to find anything as twisted as this hysterical right-wing defense of All Things Reagan. To these fanatics, saying anything against Reagan is as bad as Sinead O'Connor tearing up the pope's picture on Saturday Night Live.

Well, try this on for balance, folks: anyone with the slightest intelligence knows that Reagan was a vicious dolt. He should have gone straight from the White House to federal prison, and it will take the country decades to recover from the self-inflicted humiliation of having once (much less twice) elected him.

Back to the present: Dennis Kucinich, the anti-Reagan, managed to turn a debate appearance into a personals ad. After describing his ideal mate and First Lady, D. K. got off by far the most memorable line of the entire political season: "If you're out there, call me."

At the same debate, John Kerry twice began his closing statement while another candidate was talking. What was he thinking? Where did he think he was? The word "gork" comes to mind (gork--noun, a person with unknown ailments; acronym for God Only Really Knows).

Far from New Hampshire, John McCain warned of potential "global U.S. defeat on the scale of Vietnam."

George W. Bush was having none of it. The commander-in-chief continued to maintain (not so much by his words, which no sensible person can bear to listen to anymore, as by his failure to attend a single memorial service and by virtue of a ban on news photographs of military caskets) that no one, no one at all, had died in Iraq.

An hour spent changing channels appeared to confirm the White House view, turning up nothing much but commentary on the Laci Peterson case.

Surely, surely it cannot get any worse ...

David Vest writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band, The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way Down Here.

He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com

Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com

 

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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