Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
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
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
Recent
Stories
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
Demostration 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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Chilean
Coup Memorial Edition
September 11, 2003
Exploiting
Anxiety
The
Political Capital of 9/11
By NORMAN SOLOMON
The Bush administration never hesitated to exploit
the general public's anxieties that arose after the traumatic
events of September 11, 2001.
Testifying on Capitol Hill exactly 53
weeks later, Donald Rumsfeld did not miss a beat when a member
of the Senate Armed Services Committee questioned the need for
the United States to attack Iraq.
Senator Mark Dayton: "What is it
compelling us now to make a precipitous decision and take precipitous
actions?"
Defense Secretary Rumsfeld: "What's
different? What's different is 3,000 people were killed."
As a practical matter, it was almost
beside the point that allegations linking Baghdad with the September
11 attacks lacked credible evidence. The key factor was political
manipulation, not real documentation.
Former CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack got
enormous media exposure in late 2002 for his book "The Threatening
Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq." Pollack's book promotion
tour often seemed more like a war promotion tour. During a typical
CNN appearance, Pollack explained why he had come to see a "massive
invasion" of Iraq as both desirable and practical:  "The
real difference was the change from September 11th. The sense
that after September 11th, the American people were now willing
to make sacrifices to prevent threats from abroad from coming
home to visit us here made it possible to think about a big invasion
force."
Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk,
with the London-based Independent newspaper, was on the mark
when he wrote: "Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 11
September. If the United States invades Iraq, we should remember
that."
But at psychological levels, the Bush
team was able to manipulate post-9/11 emotions well beyond the
phantom of Iraqi involvement in that crime against humanity.
The dramatic changes in political climate after 9/11 included
a drastic upward spike in an attitude -- fervently stoked by
the likes of Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and the president -- that
our military should be willing to attack potential enemies before
they might try to attack us. Few politicians or pundits were
willing to confront the reality that this was a formula for perpetual
war, and for the creation of vast numbers of new foes who would
see a reciprocal logic in embracing such a credo themselves.
One of the great media cliches of the
last two years is that 9/11 "changed everything." The
portentous idea soon became a truism for news outlets nationwide.
But the shock of September 11 could not endure. And the events
of that horrific day -- while abruptly tilting the political
landscape and media discourse -- did not transform the lives
of most Americans. Despite all the genuine anguish and the overwhelming
news coverage, daily life gradually went back to an approximation
of normal.
Some changes are obvious. Worries about
terrorism have become routine. Out of necessity, stepped-up security
measures are in effect at airports. Unnecessarily, and ominously,
the USA Patriot Act is chipping away at civil liberties. Yet
the basic concerns of September 10, 2001, remain with us today.
The nation's current economic picture
includes the familiar scourges of unemployment, job insecurity,
eroding pension benefits and a wildly exorbitant healthcare system
that endangers huge numbers of people who are uninsured or underinsured.
Two years after 9/11, the power of money is undiminished -- notwithstanding
every platitude that bounced around the media echo chamber in
the wake of September 11.
During the last months of 2001, many
media powerhouses heralded the arrival of humanistic values for
the country. Typically, the December issue of O -- "The
Oprah Magazine" -- was largely devoted to the cover story
"We Are Family." In the lead-off essay, Oprah Winfrey
served up a heaping portion of sweet pabulum. "Our vision
of family has been expanded," she wrote. "From the
ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and that field
in Pennsylvania arose a new spirit of unity. We realize that
we are all part of the family of America." Later in the
glossy, ad-filled magazine, the "We Are Family" headline
reappeared under Old Glory and over another message from Oprah,
who declared: "America is a vast and complicated family,
but -- as the smoke clears and the dust settles -- a family nonetheless."
From the vantage point of the present
day, the late-2001 claims about a new national altruism invite
disbelief if not derision. No amount of media spin about "the
family of America" can negate the fact that gaps between
wealth and poverty have never been wider. What kind of affluent
family would leave so many of its members in desperate need?
As measured by poll numbers, President
Bush's fall from popular grace this year has brought him back
to about where he was just before 9/11. That decline runs parallel
with slumping myths about the transcendent aftermath of September
11. Subsequent events have brought sobering realities into focus.
Recent news about Halliburton and Bechtel
cashing in on the occupation of Iraq is a counterpoint to revelations
that the White House strongly pressured the Environmental Protection
Agency in the days after 9/11 to mislead the public about dangers
of airborne toxic particles from World Trade Center debris. The
EPA's Office of the Inspector General reported last month that
"the desire to reopen Wall Street" was a major factor
in the Bush administration's misleading assurances. Although
the public was told that everything had changed, powerful elites
gave the highest priority to resuming business as usual.
After September 11, while many thousands
of people grieved the sudden loss of their loved ones, a steady
downpour of politically driven sentimentality kept blurring the
U.S. media's window on the world. Politicians in high office,
from President Bush on down, rushed to identify themselves with
the dead and their relatives. Cataclysmic individual losses were
swiftly expropriated for mass dissemination.
In a cauldron of media alchemy, the human
suffering of 9/11 became propaganda gold. Sorrow turned into
political capital.
The human process of mourning is intimate
and often at a loss for words; journalists and politicians tend
to be neither. Grief borders on the ineffable. News coverage
gravitates toward cliches and facile images.
In tandem with the message that September
11 "changed everything" came an emboldened insistence
on the U.S. prerogative to attack other countries at will. In
a bait-and-switch operation that took hold in autumn 2001, emblems
of 9/11 soon underwent double exposure with prevailing political
agendas.
Displayed by many as an expression of
sorrow and solidarity with the September 11 victims, the American
flag was promptly overlaid on the missiles bound for Afghanistan.
In TV studios, like angelic symbols dancing on the heads of pins,
the Stars and Stripes got stuck on the lapels of many newscasters.
Network correspondents routinely joined
in upbeat assessments of the <U.S.-led> assault on Afghanistan
that took the lives of at least as many blameless civilians as
9/11 did. Later, the <U.S.-led> invasion of Iraq, which
overthrew a regime in Baghdad with no links to the September
11 hijackings or Al Qaeda, took more civilian lives than 9/11
did. For the United States, moral reflection could not hold a
candle to the righteous adrenaline of war.
Two years ago, W.H. Auden's mournful
poem "September 1, 1939" suddenly drew wide media attention.
Set amid the "blind skyscrapers" of Manhattan, where
"buildings grope the sky," the poem seemed to eerily
echo the World Trade Center calamity with words that closed the
first stanza: "The unmentionable odor of death / Offends
the September night."
The concluding lines of the next verse
received less notice during the terrible autumn of 2001. But
we now have more reason to consider their meaning:
"Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return."
Norman Solomon is
executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is
co-author, with Reese Erlich, of "Target
Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You."
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 1 / 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
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