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Today's
Stories
June
2, 2004
Brian
Cloughley
The Liars are Winning
Ray
McGovern
How Far Would They Go? Beware "Credible
Intelligence"
Josh
Frank
The Anybody But Bush Offensive
Mike
Whitney
The Afghanistan Failure: Bush's Warlord Patriots
Jackie
Corr
Iraq and Ireland: Three Tales from Butte, Montana
Robert
Jensen
The US Lost the Iraq War...and It's a Good Thing, Too
Alexander
Cockburn
"Bye, Bye Boonville!"
June
1, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Instant Karma: Bush's Sins Catch Up
with Him
William
A. Cook
Manufacturers of Fear and Loathing in
Rafah
Dave
Lindorff
Will the Times Clean House?
Kevin
Zeese
Inside the Kerry / Nader Meeting: Did
the Kerry Campaign Lie About What Was Discussed?
Jacob
Levich
Coming Soon: Return of the Draft,
a Bipartisan Production
Kathy
Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness v. the US
Government
Website
of the Day
Remind Us
May
29 / 31, 2004
Lee
Ballinger / Dave Marsh
The Origins of Memorial Day
Janine
Pommy Vega
Memo for Memorial Day
Mike
Ferner
On Their Way to Abu Ghraib
Alfred
W. McCoy
The Cruel Shadow: the Long History of CIA Torture Research
Douglas
Valentine
An Open Letter to the NYT: Questions, Questions, Questions
Chris
White
First to Fight Culture: a Former Marine on the Marine Motto
Bruce
Anderson
The Awful Injustice to Tai Abreu
David
Vest
Get Ready for Kerry's War: the 100 Year Quagmire
Saul
Landau
Torture: the Logical Outcome of Bush's War for Democracy?
Kurt
Nimmo
Abu Hamza al-Mazri, Made in the USA
Elaine
Cassel
The Secrets of Surveillance: Ashcroft, Snoops, and Gag Orders
Will
Potter
The New War on "Terror": Protest the Torture of Chimps;
Get Arrested as a "Terrorist"
Ben
Tripp
They Fiddled While Nero Got the Matches
Dr.
Susan Block
Save Abu Ghraib!
Kia
Kojouri
Nukes, the US, Israel and Iran: an
Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh
Mickey
Z
D-Day: 60 Years is Enough!
Jon
Brown
Correcting the Correction at the Times
Patrick
B. Barr
Pre-emptive War Insurance
Stephen
Gowans
Bad Apples in a Bad Barrel
Tom
Gorman
Gore on Bush in Iraq: the Approach May be Exotic, But It's Hardly
New
Dave
Zirin
Fighting for Boxers' Rights: an Interview with Eddie Mustafa
Muhammad
Gregory
Weiher
Bush to Arabs: "Go Get Yourself Some Democracy"
Erik
Cummings
Jung Meets Bush
Poets'
Basement
Davies, Ford, Kearney, McLellan and Albert
May
28, 2004
Rafael
Rodriguez Cruz
Curtain of Silence on the Cuban 5
Greg
Moses
Bush's Misleading Speech on Abu Ghraib
Dave
Lindorff
Dissing Independent Contractors:
Those Who Do the Dirty Work
Norman
Solomon
Leaping for Lies at the Times
Rep.
Bill Delahunt
Bush's Cruel New Rules on Cuba
Paul
McGeough
Chalabi Baba and the 40 Thieves
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India and Nehru: 40 Years After
Alexander
Cockburn
NYTs: "Maybe We Did Screw Up...a
Little"
May
27, 2004
Amy
Goodman / David Goodman
Fatal Errors: the Lies of Our Times
Douglas
Valentine
Ragging the Dogs of War at the
NYTs
John
L. Hess
The Times Confesses...Kind Of
Stew
Albert
Dellinger, the Wrestling Pacifist
Dave
Dellinger
a 1993 Interview
Christopher
Brauchli
Tax Breaks for Scions...to Hell with Poor Kids
Rampton
/ Stauber
Banana Republicans: Pumping Irony
May
26, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Goodbye, David Dellinger: He Was a
Friend of Ours
Robert
Fisk
The Things Bush Didn't Say in His Speech
Zeynep
Toufe
New Draft UN Resolution Permits Perpetual Occupation
Conn
Hallinan
Bush and Sharon: the Oil Connection
Tom
Stephens
2 + 2 is On My Mind: More Morons
and War Crimes
Derek
Medley
Protesting Gov. Bigot
CounterPunch
Wire
FBI Abducts Artist; Seizes Art
Andrew
Cockburn
The Trail to Tehran
May
25, 2004
Joe
Bageant
The Covert Kingdom: On Earth as It
is in Texas
Col.
Dan Smith
A Question of Human Dignity
Gary
Handschumacher
Visiting Lori Berenson: Time to Bring Her Home
Toni
Solo
A Developing War in the Andes
Marc
Estrin
September Song: Disturbing Questions
About 9/11
Stephen
Banko, III
A Vietnam Vet on "Supporting the
Troops"
Website
of the Day
The Wizard of Whimsy
May
24, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Dan Senor is Safe!
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Tricks & TortureGate: the
Missing Taguba Pages
Sam
Hamod
Gen. Zinni: "Wrong War, Wrong
Place, Wrong Time"
Mike
Whitney
The Wedding was a Bomb
Stan
Goff
Open Season on MAMs
Image
of the Day
A Photo from Abu Ghraib We Didn't See on the Front Page of the
NYTs
May
22 / 23, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
Colin Powell, a Political Obituary
Jeffrey
St. Clair
When War is Swell: Bush and the Carlyle Group
Elizabeth
Weill-Greenberg
Her Son Was Told He Wouldn't See Combat; Now He's Dead: an Interview
with Sue Niederer
Brian
Cloughley
America is Committing War Crimes in Iraq
Saul
Landau
Democracy in Latin America: Great for Investors; Not So Good
for People
Brandy
Baker
Feminists Stand By Their Man: Abortion, Judges and Kerry
Randall
Robinson
Bushwhacked in the Caribbean
Uri
Avnery
The Rape of Rafah
Ben
Tripp
Assume the Worst
Bruce
Anderson
News from Ecotopia: the Truth About the Wine Business
Josh
Ruebner
Why I Burned My Israeli Military Papers
Peter
Wolson, Ph. D.
Exhibitionistic Revenge at Abu Ghraib
Chloe
Cockburn
In Defense of "Troy": What Hector Could Teach Rummy
Linda
Burnham
Sexual Domination in Uniform: an American Value
Adrien
Rain Burke
War of the Necrophiliacs: Spc. Sabrina Harman and Her Corpse
David
Krieger
Charting a New Course for US Nuclear Policy
Ron
Jacobs
Turnaround
Poets'
Basement
Ford, Albert & LaMorticella
May 21, 2004
Ray
Close
The Canards of the Apologists
Christopher
Brauchli
"The Object of Torture is Torture"
Amira
Hass
Darkness at Noon
Jack
McCarthy
Camilo Mejia: Can the Son of a Sandinista Get a Fair Trial from
the US Army?
Bill
Kauffman
Nader v. Bush
Omar
Barghouti
No More Tears for America
Ghali
Hassan
Moral Failure of the "Free World" in Gaza
Christopher
Reed
How the CIA Taught the Portuguese to
Torture
Website
of the Day
Eric Idle on the Bush Administration: Fuck You, So Very Much
May
20, 2004
Andrew
Cockburn
The Truth About Chalabi
Kathy
Kelly
A Visit from the FBI
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Brown and Bored of Education in India
Tom
Stephens & John Philo
The War Crimes of Bush, Cheney & Co.
Sam
Bahour / Michael Dahan
Genocide by Public Policy
Robert
Ovetz
Ending the Race for the Last Turtle
Billy
Wilson
The Most Important Thing I Learned at School This Year
Website
of the Day
Rafah Today
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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June
2, 2004
"Bye,
Bye Boonville; Hello Eugene!"
America's
Greatest Editor Moves On
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
By year's end the greatest newspaper
in the United States will have relocated from California's North
Coast to Eugene, Oregon. Bruce Anderson is leaving Boonville.
The Anderson Valley Advertiser will become The Eugene AVA.
Be advised: what follows is
no mock heroic paean with tongue in cheek. I write as a 19-year
contributor to the AVA and a pal of the Editor, and can therefore
state with more knowledge than most that as an example of all
that is seditious, muckraking, contrarian, courageous and uproarious
in American journalism, Bruce Anderson's AVA has been up there
with the best of Paine, Twain, Steffens and H.L. Mencken.
Bruce and Ling Anderson came
north from San Francisco in 1970, settled in Boonville, in Mendocino
county, and spent the next fourteen years running a foster home.
In 1984, Anderson bought the AVA (pure coincidence in nomenclature),
a lackluster little weekly founded in 1955, full of the above
mentioned tributes to the Chamber of Commerce. He was its fourth
owner and its circulation was about 600.
The life of a local newspaper
editor can be risky and turbulent unless you're going to reprint
hand-outs from the Chamber of Commerce which is the prime function
of 98 per cent of all local papers in the US, as distinct from
the national press, whose role is to reprint the hand-outs of
the White House, major government agencies and large corporations.
"My general idea was to
use the Anderson Valley Advertiser as a weapon in my wars against
the County Office of Education , and the local power structure
generally. Immediately all of the few advertisers bailed out
after the first issue, one of them by a telegram from Ukiah which
said 'Out, out, out now!!' It was delivered by mail days later.
In those days, if you beat everyone out of the bushes, there
were about 2000 living along Anderson Valley, mostly ranchers
and loggers and of course back-to-land hippies. The place was
run by an old guard consisting of gyppo loggers.
"The dilemma was, you'd
estrange at least half your audience, hippies or ranchers, no
matter what kind of paper. My idea was to put out a paper that
alienated all of them. I unified the community, against me. But
it was interesting and they had to read it. The paper had an
almost immediate political effect, basically by attracting outside
attention, which Mendocino county--at least those who run it--loathes.
"I was blamed for the
departure of something like six county school superintendants
in a row. Two of them went to jail because of our campaigns.
We started covering the court system in detail, and that led
to small triumphs. An example: the court law library, publicly
funded, was supposed to be accessible to the public. But you
had to ask one of the judges for a key. We made a row about it,
and today it's always open and has a staff helping people."
A law library in the courthouse,
open to the public. Is it that big a deal? Yes indeed, particularly
if you multiply these little victories into a much larger, socially
and politically significant piece of arithmetic. No matter that
the AVA's circulation has never risen much above 3,000, about
half of which is out of county and a good chunk out of state.
When cops, prosecutors, judges, educational bigwigs, hospital
administrators, winegrowers, industrial polluter,lumber baronets,
New Age confidence trickster, and all the kindred petty Hitlers
and scamsters that make up the fragrant tapestry of any county
in the US know the local paper will put them in the pillory on
its front page, they take heed. If there was an AVA in every
county, America would be a very different place.
But you can't mass produce
Bruce Andersons. You can't train people to write prose as good
and as funny as his, week after week. How many people are prepared
to stake their home every week which is what someone as defiant
of the libel laws as Bruce has done most weeks for the past twenty
years? How many of them have passed through the De Boies Clubs,
the Marine Corps, the Peace Corps, a life-time of voracious reading
and an appetite for journalistic bomb-throwing as instinctive
as that of any turn-of-the-century Spanish anarchist spotting
a monarch bowling along in his carriage, perfumed whiskers akimbo.
Every now and again I'd put
the AVA's campaigns into columns I wrote for the Wall Street
Journal and later the Los Angeles Times: the Bosco affair, when
partly by dint of a satiric "interview" the AVA terminated
the career of the four-term incumbent of California's first congressional
district; "Redwood Summer" in 1990; the successful
defense of Bear Lincoln on charges of murdering a sheriff's deputy;
the crucial role of the AVA in getting Mendocino county enhanced
by a libertarian DA, Norm Vroman, and a libertarian sheriff,
Tony Craver (though I have to say, Vroman never did come through
on his promise to me to tell all juries in his cases their full
rights.) Most times, after I'd cited the AVA, I'd get grateful
notes from people from around the country, telling me they'd
become AVA subscriber-addicts, and now knew more about the day-to-day
business of Mendocino county than wherever they were living,
and that most times they could make all the appropriate local
parallels.
Why's he leaving? It's been
no secret that Bruce's wife Ling felt that there should be term
limits to her sojourn in Boonville, or Mendocino county for that
matter. Her best friend lives in Eugene. "She's happy, I'm
happy," Bruce says. From next week the official Anderson
residence will be in Eugene, though Bruce will commute for the
next six months, while the AVA remains Boonville, rather than
Eugene-based. He'll be on our CounterPunch website.
In Mendocino county, the petty
potentates, the self-righteous pwogs and New Agers will be happy,
but there will be regrets among many, many more. As Anderson
says, "I've always had a fairly broad base of support that
ideologically runs across a wide spectrum of people. The hard-core
enemies are full-time professional Democrats. They've always
hated and feared my paper. The AVA has proved that people will
read about the area they live in, though most papers simply don't
cover the area they circulate in. We had this whole area simply
by default. For less favored citizens we became the newspaper
of last and only resort. Our readership is from the bottom up,
starting with prisoners, all off the normal lib-lab spectrum."
Down the years, Anderson reckons,
journalism has mostly got worse. "These papers, like the
Press Democrat or the Ukiah Daily Journal, try to please everybody.
The average citizen has utter and total contempt for them, rightly
so. It weren't for the internet there would be total silence.
Another small example: The (New York Times-owned) Press Democrat
actually cut down its letters page. They have to be 250 words
or less." Of course the AVA's multipage Letters to the Editor
has been one of its greatest glories.
In Mendocino county the paper
will be missed. It has prevented a lot of bad things happening;
even though as Bruce says, "bad people haven't been slowed
at the national level."
He and Ling are quitting a
valley that he reckons is "doomed. It's just been featured
in Forbes as the most undervalued beautiful place in America.
It's now run by millionaire lawyers with 10 acres of grapes and
their own silly faces on their wine labels."
His initial feel about Oregon
is that it hosts "a lot of highly irritating people, fertile
pickings." The journalistic palate of Eugene will be richer.
It has a federal court, a university, a lot of pompous faculty
people.
Bruce is 64 years old. "Enough
time to do something." Look out, Eugene. One of the most
vivid pens of our time is coming your way. The next chapter should
be a lot of fun.
Bruce Anderson can be reached at: ava@pacific.net
Weekend Edition
Features for May 29 / 31, 2004
Mike
Ferner
On Their Way to Abu Ghraib
Alfred
W. McCoy
The Cruel Shadow: the Long History of CIA Torture Research
Douglas
Valentine
An Open Letter to the NYT: Questions, Questions, Questions
Chris
White
First to Fight Culture: a Former Marine on the Marine Motto
Bruce
Anderson
The Awful Injustice to Tai Abreu
David
Vest
Get Ready for Kerry's War: the 100 Year Quagmire
Saul
Landau
Torture: the Logical Outcome of Bush's War for Democracy?
Kurt
Nimmo
Abu Hamza al-Mazri, Made in the USA
Elaine
Cassel
The Secrets of Surveillance: Ashcroft, Snoops, and Gag Orders
Will
Potter
The New War on "Terror": Protest the Torture of Chimps;
Get Arrested as a "Terrorist"
Ben
Tripp
They Fiddled While Nero Got the Matches
Dr.
Susan Block
Save Abu Ghraib!
Kia
Kojouri
Nukes, the US, Israel and Iran: an
Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh
Mickey
Z
D-Day: 60 Years is Enough!
Jon
Brown
Correcting the Correction at the Times
Patrick
B. Barr
Pre-emptive War Insurance
Stephen
Gowans
Bad Apples in a Bad Barrel
Tom
Gorman
Gore on Bush in Iraq: the Approach May be Exotic, But It's Hardly
New
Dave
Zirin
Fighting for Boxers' Rights: an Interview with Eddie Mustafa
Muhammad
Gregory
Weiher
Bush to Arabs: "Go Get Yourself Some Democracy"
Erik
Cummings
Jung Meets Bush
Poets'
Basement
Davies, Ford, Kearney, McLellan and Albert
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