Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 16, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
Recent
Stories
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
September 9, 2003
William A. Cook
Eating
Humble Pie
Robert Jensen / Rahul
Mahajan
Bush
Speech: a Shell Game on the American Electorate
Bill Glahn
A Kinder, Gentler RIAA?
Janet Kauffman
A Dirty River Runs Beneath It
Chris Floyd
Strange Attractors: White House Bawds Breed New Terror
Bridget Gibson
A Helping of Crow with Those Fries?
Robert Fisk
Thugs
in Business Suit: Meet the New Iraqi Strongman
Website of the Day
Pot TV International
September 8, 2003
David Lindorff
The
Bush Speech: Spinning a Fiasco
Robert Jensen
Through the Eyes of Foreigners: the US Political Crisis
Gila Svirsky
Of
Dialogue and Assassination: Off Their Heads
Bob Fitrakis
Demonstration Democracy
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Echo Chamber: Globalizing the Whirlwind
Sean Carter
Thou Shalt Not Campaign from the Bench
Uri Avnery
Betrayal
at Camp David
Website of the Day
Rabbis v. the Patriot Act
September 6 / 7, 2003
Neve Gordon
Strategic
Abuse: Outsourcing Human Rights Violations
Gary Leupp
Shiites
Humiliate Bush
Saul Landau
Fidel
and The Prince
Denis Halliday
Of Sanctions and Bombings: the UN Failed the People of Iraq
John Feffer
Hexangonal Headache: N. Korea Talks Were a Disaster
Ron Jacobs
The Stage of History
M. Shahid Alam
Pakistan "Recognizes" Israel
Laura Carlson
The Militarization of the Americas
Elaine Cassel
The Forgotten Prisoners of Guantanamo
James T. Phillips
The Mumbo-Jumbo War
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Slumlords of the Internet
Walter A. Davis
Living in Death's Dream Kingdom
Adam Engel
Midnight's Inner Children
Poets' Basement
Stein, Guthrie and Albert
Book of the Weekend
It Became Necessary to Destroy the Planet in Order to Save It
by Khalil Bendib
September 5, 2003
Brian Cloughley
Bush's
Stacked Deck: Why Doesn't the Commander-in-Chief Visit the Wounded?
Col. Dan Smith
Iraq
as Black Hole
Phyllis Bennis
A Return
to the UN?
Dr. Susan Block
Exxxtreme Ashcroft
Dave Lindorff
Courage and the Democrats
Abe Bonowitz
Reflections on the "Matyrdom" of Paul Hill
Robert Fisk
We Were
Warned About This Chaos
Website of the Day
New York Comic Book Museum
September 4, 2003
Stan Goff
The Bush
Folly: Between Iraq and a Hard Place
John Ross
Mexico's
Hopes for Democracy Hit Dead-End
Harvey Wasserman
Bush to New Yorkers: Drop Dead
Adam Federman
McCain's
Grim Vision: Waging a War That's Already Been Lost
Aluf Benn
Sharon Saved from Threat of Peace
W. John Green
Colombia's Dirty War
Joanne Mariner
Truth,
Justice and Reconciliation in Latin America
Website of the Day
Califoracle
September 3, 2003
Virginia Tilley
Hyperpower
in a Sinkhole
Davey D
A Hip
Hop Perspective on the Cali Recall
Emrah Göker
Conscripting Turkey: Imperial Mercenaries Wanted
John Stanton
The US is a Power, But Not Super
Brian Cloughley
The
Pentagon's Bungled PsyOps Plan
Dan Bacher
Another Big Salmon Kill
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors Weep' Ninth Circuit Overturns 127 Death Sentences
Uri Avnery
First
of All This Wall Must Fall
Website of the Day
Art Attack!
September 2, 2003
Robert Fisk
Bush's
Occupational Fantasies Lead Iraq Toward Civil War
Kurt Nimmo
Rouind Up the Usual Suspects: the Iman Ali Mosque Bombing
Robert Jensen / Rahul Mahajan
Iraqi Liberation, Bush Style
Elaine Cassel
Innocent But Guilty: When Prosecutors are Dead Wrong
Jason Leopold
Ghosts
in the Machines: the Business of Counting Votes
Dave Lindorff
Dems in 2004: Perfect Storm or Same Old Doldrums?
Paul de Rooij
Predictable
Propaganda: Four Monts of US Occupation
Website of the Day
Laughing Squid
August 30 / Sept. 1,
2003
Alexander Cockburn
Handmaiden
in Babylon: Annan, Vieiera de Mello and the Decline and Fall
of the UN
Saul Landau
Schwarzenegger
and Cuban Migration
Standard Schaefer
Who
Benefited from the Tech Bubble: an Interview with Michael Hudson
Gary Leupp
Mel Gibson's Christ on Trial
William S. Lind
Send the Neocons to Baghdad
Augustin Velloso
Aznar: Spain's Super Lackey
Jorge Mariscal
The Smearing of Cruz Bustamante
John Ross
A NAFTA for Energy? The US Looks to Suck Up Mexico's Power
Mickey Z.
War is a Racket: The Wisdom of Gen. Smedley Butler
Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Show Isn't Winning Many Converts
Stan Cox
Pirates of the Caribbean: the WTO Comes to Cancun
Tom and Judy Turnipseed
Take Back Your Time Day
Adam Engel
The Red Badge of Knowledge: a Review of TDY
Adam Engel
An Eye on Intelligence: an Interview with Douglas Valentine
Susan Davis
Northfork,
an Accidental Review
Nicholas Rowe
Dance
and the Occupation
Mark Zepezauer
Operation
Candor
Poets' Basement
Albert, Guthrie and Hamod
Website of the Weekend
Downhill
Battle
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 29, 2003
Lenni Brenner
God
and the Democratic Wing of the Democratic Party
Brian Cloughley
When in Doubt, Lie Your Head Off
Alice Slater
Bush Nuclear Policy is a Recipe for National Insecurity
David Krieger
What Victory?
Marjorie Cohn
The Thin Blue Line: How the US Occupation of Iraq Imperils International
Law
Richard Glen Boire
Saying Yes to Drugs!
Bister, Estrin and Jacobs
Howard Dean, the Progressive Anti-War Candidate? Some Vermonters
Give Their Views
Website of the Day
DirtyBush
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
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
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
16, 2003
Powell in Baghdad
Imperial
Sociopaths
By KURT NIMMO
"The sociopath sees other people
as objects to be manipulated and used, much as the rest of us
would use a screwdriver or a kleenex. The sociopath feels no
empathy for others (although he can fake empathy) and he feels
no shame or remorse about abusing people. In his universe, he
is the center, and everyone else exists only to serve him."
-- Glenn Campbell
Christopher Columbus
was a Sociopath
"It appears to me, that the people
are ingenious, and would be good servants and I am of opinion
that they would very readily become Christians, as they appear
to have no religion," wrote Columbus in his journal upon
encountering the natives of Guanahani.
Columbus installed himself as "viceroy
and governor of [the Caribbean islands] and the mainland"
of America. He instituted slavery (encomiendo) and engaged in
the systematic extermination of the native Taino population.
These natives numbered approximately 8 million when Columbus
arrived; upon his departure the Taino numbered around 100,000.
A  census taken in 1542 reported
only 200 remained. By 1555 the natives of Haiti were completely
extinct. "All told, it is probable that more than one hundred
million native people were 'eliminated' in the course of Europe's
ongoing 'civilization' of the Western Hemisphere," explains
Ward Churchill.
"There are more American Indians
alive today than there were when Columbus arrived or at any other
time in history," radio talkshow know-it-all Rush Limbaugh
once declared. "Does this sound like a record of genocide?"
Yet according to the 2000 Census, there
were 1,678,765 Indian Americans, down from an excess of 12 million
prior to the arrival of Columbus. Not only is Limbaugh a liar
-- he is an ignoramus. But then considering he makes a comfortable
living inventing excuses for neocon sociopaths, this should probably
be expected.
Going after the New
Canaanites
John Winthrop, the first governor of
Massachusetts Bay, considered America the New Israel and the
Puritans Israelites. Like the Zionists of today, these evangelical
Puritans believed the land where millions of indigenous natives
lived was for their exclusive use and possession, given to them
by an Old Testament god. The American Indians were the "new
Canaanites" in America's "Promised Land." It was
the divine mission of the Puritans to convert these "Canaanites"
to Christianity. If that failed, it was acceptable to slaughter
them in the name of Christ.
"God laughed his Enemies and the
Enemies of his People to Scorn, making them as a fiery Oven,"
declared Captain John Mason as he went about slaughtering the
Pequot Indian tribe in 1637. "Thus did the Lord judge among
the Heathen, filling the Place with dead Bodies." "Sometimes
the Scripture declareth women and children must perish
with their parents," added Captain John Underhill. "We
have sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings."
In other words, the Puritans referenced the Bible for genocidal
inspiration, just as the Zionists and the Christian Zionists
reference it today.
Within two hundred years John Winthrop's
New Israel became John L. O'Sullivan's Manifest Destiny. It contained
similar evangelical Christian underpinnings. "It had a future
that was destined by God to expand its borders, with no limit
to area or country. All the traveling and expansion were part
of the spirit of Manifest Destiny, a belief that it was God's
will that Americans spread over the entire continent, and to
control and populate the country as they see fit. Many expansionists
conceived God as having the power to sustain and guide human
destiny," notes Michael T. Lubragge. Manifest Destiny seized
the Puritan notion of establishing a "city on a hill"
and injected it with ideological and religious steroids. And
like the Puritans, adherents of Manifest Destiny had no problem
eliminating those who stood in their way -- namely Indians.
According to O'Sullivan, a democratic
leader and influential editor, the unhindered imperialist expansion
of European white people over native American land was "right
such as that of the tree to the space of air and the earth suitable
for the full expansion of its principle and destiny of growth."
Soon after O'Sullivan uttered these words, the United States
declared war on Mexico and proceeded to grab much of what is
now the Southwestern United States.
William E. Channing, in a letter to Henry
Clay in 1837, wrote that "the Indians have melted before
the white man, and the mixed, degraded race of Mexico must melt
before the Anglo-Saxon. Away with this vile sophistry! There
is no necessity for crime. There is no fate to justify rapacious
nations, any more than to justify gamblers and robbers, in plunder.
We boast of the progress of society, and this progress consists
in the substitution of reason and moral principle for the sway
of brute force."
So powerful was the "sway of brute
force" mingled with religious fanaticism in the name of
empire that Albert T. Beveridge stood before the Senate and proclaimed:
"God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Tectonic
peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-admiration.
No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish
system where chaos reigns... He has made us adepts in government
that we may administer government among savages and senile peoples."
If you edit out the overt racism and over-the-top religiosity
from the above statement it sounds close to something a neocon
sociopath told the Wall Street Journal last week. It's a "clash
of civilizations" driving the neocon war against the Third
World, the idea that our everybody on the planet should have
"democracy" forced on them at gunpoint. No doubt Albert
T. Beveridge would nod his head in agreement if he were alive
today.
Chronic Wrongdoing
in the Empire
But it wasn't strictly the American West
and Mexico where Manifest Destiny came into destructive play.
The US intervened militarily in Puerto Rico (1824), Nicaragua
(1857 and 1860), and in the province of Panama (1860). In 1898,
President McKinley used the accidental explosion aboard the US
battleship Maine in Havana harbor as a pretext to launch the
Spanish-American war and invade and occupy Cuba.
"Incidental to our tenure in the
Philippines is the commercial opportunity to which American statesmanship
cannot be indifferent," declared McKinley as Admiral Dewey
destroyed Spain's Pacific fleet at Cavite, in the <Philippines.The>
"annexation" of the Philippines resulted in 200,000
civilian dead and nearly fifty years of US colonialism. "Whatever
a man feels or thinks or does, there is never any but one reason
for it -- and that is a selfish one," wrote Mark Twain of
the invasion and occupation of the Philippines.
"Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence
which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized
society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention
by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence
of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the US,
however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or
impotence, to the exercise of an international police power,"
said President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903. In other words, the
United States felt compelled to protect the interests of the
United Fruit Company in Costa Rica, Colombia, and Venezuela.
The Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine in 1905 declared the United States to be the policeman
of the Caribbean. That same year the Dominican Republic was placed
under a customs receivership, i.e., the US would run its affairs
and decide what particular sociopath would act as its unelected
leader, so long as he knew how the treat the locals when they
revolted, as they did on occasion. So feverish was the Roosevelt
Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine that when the Mexicans refused
to salute the US flag, a battleship shelled Veracruz and Marines
invaded part of the city.
American Sociopaths:
Serving Other Imperatives
And so US sociopaths behaved for most
of the 20th century. "The engine of American foreign policy
has been fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, but
rather by the necessity to serve other imperatives," writes
William Blum (a lack of moral sense is a key attribute of clinical
sociopathy). As the meticulous research of Blum demonstrates,
the United States intervened covertly and overtly in:
China (1945-49)
Italy (1947-48)
Greece (1947-49 and 1964-74)
the Philippines (1945-53)
South Korea (1945-53)
Albania (1949-53)
Iran (1953)
Guatemala (1953-1990s)
the Middle East (1956-58)
Indonesia (1957-58 and 1965)
British Guiana/Guyana (1953-64)
Vietnam (1950-73)
Cambodia (1955-73)
the Congo/Zaire (1960-65)
Brazil (1961-64)
the Dominican Republic (1963-66)
Cuba (1959 to present)
Chile (1964-73)
East Timor (1975 to present)
Nicaragua (1978-89)
Grenada (1979-84)
Libya (1981-89)
Panama (1989)
Iraq (1990s and 2003)
Afghanistan (1979-92 and 2001 to the present),
El Salvador (1980-92)
Yugoslavia (1999)
These interventions and covert underminings
have resulted in numerous military coups, countless tortures,
disappearances, mass starvation, assassinations, and literally
millions of dead people all over the world (200,000 in East Timor
out of a population of between 600,000 and 700,000; a million
in Indonesia; 75,000 in El Salvador; 100,000 in Guatemala; upward
to 2 million in Cambodia; 3 million in Vietnam).
Creative Destruction:
the Neocon Sociopaths
The Bush neocons are simply the most
recent and some would argue to most vicious and ideologically
demented of a long line of American sociopaths serving empire
and pathologically selfish personal interests. While an earlier
sociopath, Albert T. Beveridge, believed the Judeo-Christian
god "has made us the master organizers of the world to establish
system where chaos reigns," present day neocon sociopath
Michael Ledeen has embraced chaos and declares "Creative
destruction is our middle name. We do it automatically..."
Ledeen may sincerely believe this form
of destruction -- the neocon "sway of brute force"
in the name of a renewed and updated version of global Manifest
Destiny and an Americanized "city on a hill" -- may
be "creative," but for thousands of Iraqis and Afghans
it is nothing less than merciless barbarism, pernicious mass
murder. Spreading between 1000-2000 tons of depleted uranium
over the Iraqi countryside is anything but creative -- it is
a war crime of a nearly unimaginable magnitude, an immeasurably
destructive act.
The neocons, of course, are not the only
ideological sociopaths on the block. Large organizations of monetary
sociopaths -- most notably the IMF and World Bank -- have no
interest in "Christianizing" natives in the Third World,
but are as interested in gold -- or rather the new financial
gold produced through debt -- as Columbus and the Conquistadors.
"Debt is an efficient tool,"
writes Susan George. "It ensures access to other peoples'
raw materials and infrastructure on the cheapest possible terms."
Just as sociopaths following the selfish white-only Christian
contrivances of Manifest Destiny plotted to strip the Pequot,
Narragansetts, the Mohawks, the Pokanoket and many other tribes
of their ancestral land, so the sociopaths at the helm of the
IMF and World Bank conspire to steal land from the original indigenous
peoples of Papua New Guinea and elsewhere. According to UNICEF,
500,000 children per year die because of IMF and World Bank "structural
readjustment programs," the main tool used to gain control
of land and natural resources in the Third World. Only a sociopath
can sit in an office on Wall Street or in Singapore and not be
disturbed by the mass suffering and death caused by these criminal
financial policies.
"The United States achieved its
present position of strength not by practicing a foreign policy
of live and let live, nor by passively waiting for threats to
arise, but by actively promoting American principles of governance
abroad -- democracy, free markets, respect for liberty,"
explain the neocon twins Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan. In other
words, the United States has consistently employed military force
to impose "free markets" and "democracy"
-- as defined by Wall Street, investment bankers, transnational
corporations, the IMF and World Bank -- on the Third World. "Support
for American principles around the world can be sustained only
by the continuing exertion of American influence."
Resistance to the
Imperial Drive of the Neocon Sociopath
As Ken Reiner notes, people need to understand
the neocon military/transnational vision of world domination
-- and soon. If left unchecked, "America will continue its
imperial drive, utilizing its World Bank, IMF and WTO to place
the entire world under corporate control and into conditions
of slavery and colonialism. Concurrently it is uncontrollably
on a path that will irreversibly destroy the environment and
the lives of billions of helpless peoples throughout the world."
In small ways, resistance to the master
plan of the neocon sociopaths and the transnational corporations
they work for is growing. For instance, on September 12, workers
and farmers in Bangalore, India, destroyed a greenhouse at a
research facility belonging to St. Louis-based Monsanto, which
sells genetically modified seeds."We timed the attack to
draw the attention of those attending the World Trade Organization
meeting in Cancun, Mexico," said M.D. Nanjundaswamy, president
of the Karnataka State Farmers Association, an organization opposed
to the introduction of genetically altered cotton seeds in India,
saying they are environmentally hazardous and could contaminate
the genes of native varieties through cross pollination.
From the Zapatista movement in Mexico
to Sin Tierra in Brazil, to peasant movements in India and beyond,
there is a growing activism in opposition to the inhumane neoliberal
schemes of the neocons. Bush may attempt to attack these movements
by clamping down on humanitarian NGOs -- who often work side
by side with peasant groups -- but his efforts are destined to
failure.
Resistance is growing exponentially and
eventually through patience and persistence the reign of the
American sociopath may one day come to an end. Hopefully this
will happen before the clique of neocon sociopaths in Washington
-- espousing their own high-tech version of Manifest Destiny
-- completely destroy the planet's already damaged biosphere.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent online
gallery Ordinary Vistas. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn
and St. Clair's forthcoming volume, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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