Coming
in October
From Common Courage Press
Today's
Stories
August 26, 2003
Saul Landau
Bush: a Modern Ahab or a Toy Action
Figure?
Recent
Stories
August 25, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Outlaws in America
David Bacon
In Iraq, Labor Protest is a Crime
Thomas P. Healy
The Govs Come to Indy: Corps Welcome; Citizens Locked Out
Norman Madarasz
In an Elephant's Whirl: the US/Canada Relationship After the
Iraq Invasion
Salvador Peralta
The Politics of Focus Groups
Jack McCarthy
Who Killed Jancita Eagle Deer?
Uri Avnery
A Drug
for the Addict
August 23/24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
August 22, 2003
Carole Harper
Post-Sandinista
Nicaragua
John Chuckman
George Will: the Marquis of Mendacity
Richard Thieme
Operation Paperclip Revisited
Chris Floyd
Dubya Indemnity: Bush Barons Beyond the Reach of Law?
Issam Nashashibi
Palestinians
and the Right of Return: a Rigged Survey
Mary Walworth
Other People's Kids
Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Website of the Day
Current Energy
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
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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August
26, 2003
A Tradition of Smearing
the Dead
Let
Us Remember: Ahmed Hanoun Hussein, Mazen Dana, Twefiq Ghazawi,
Bahij Mentni, Rachel Corrie and Dr. David Kelly
By ROBERT FISK
The Independent
Kerbala, Iraq.
Across the marble floor of the Shrine of the Imam
Hussein in Kerbala scampers Suheil with his plastic bag of metal.
He points first to a red stain on the flagstones. "This
was a red smoke grenade that the Americans fired," he tells
me. "And that was another grenade mark." The Shia worshippers
are kneeling amid these burn marks, eyes glistening at the gold
facade of the mosque which marks the very place, behind silver
bars kissed by the faithful, where--in an epic battle far more
decisive in human history than any conflict fought by the United
States--Imam al-Hussein was cut down in AD680. There is a clink
as, one by one, Suheil drops his souvenirs on to the marble.
US forces denied that any ordnance fell
upon the shrine when they opened fire close to the Huseiniya
mosque last month. Of course they denied it. Denial has become
a disease in Iraq--as it has through most of the Middle East.
The Americans deny that they kill innocent civilians in Iraq--but
kill them all the same. The Israelis deny they kill innocent
civilians in the occupied territories--indeed, they even deny
the occupation--but kill them all the same. So folk like Suheil
are valuable. They expose lies. The evidence, in this case, are
his little souvenirs. On one of the grenades in his plastic bag
are written the words "Cartridge 44mm
Red Smoke Ground Marker M713 PB-79G041-001". Another is
designated as a "White Star Cluster M 585", yet another
carries the code "40mm M195 KX090 (figure erased) 010-086".
They are strange things to read in a religious building whose
scholars normally concentrate on the minutiae of Koranic sura
rather than the globalised linguistics of the arms trade.
But one of the Kerbala shrine's guards,
Ahmed Hanoun Hussein, was killed by the Americans when they arrived
to assist Iraqi police in a confrontation with armed thieves
near the shrine. Two more Shias were shot dead by the Americans
during a protest demonstration the next day.
Suheil insist that the US troops wanted
to enter the mosque--an unlikely scenario since they are under
orders to stay away from its vicinity--but four bullets did smash
into an outer wall. "We are peaceful people--so why do we
need this?" Suheil asks me plaintively. "Remember how
we suffered under Saddam?" And here he points upwards to
another sacrilegious assault on the shrine, this time amid the
gold of one of the two principal minarets--a shrapnel gash from
a shell fired by Saddam's legions during the great Shia revolt
of 1991, the rebellion we encouraged and then betrayed after
the last Gulf War.
So you'd think, wouldn't you, that the
shootings at Kerbala were an established fact. But no. The US
still insists it never fired into the shrine of the Imam Hussein
and "has no information" on the dead. Just as it had
"no information" about the massacre of at least six
Iraqi civilians by its soldiers during a house raid in the Mansour
district of Baghdad a month ago. Just as it has no information
on the number of Iraqi civilian casualties during and after the
illegal Anglo-American invasion, estimated at up to 5,223 by
one reputable organisation and up to 2,700 in and around Baghdad
alone according to the Los Angeles Times.
And I've no doubt there would have been
"no information" about the man shot dead by US troops
outside Abu Ghraib prison last week had he not inconveniently
turned out to be a prize-winning Reuters cameraman. Thus Mazen
Dana's death became a "terrible tragedy"--this from
the same American authorities whose Secretary of State Colin
Powell thought that the tank fire which killed another Reuters
cameraman and a Spanish journalist in April was "appropriate".
Of course, the Americans didn't hesitate to peddle the old lie
about how Dana's camera looked like a rocket-propelled grenade--the
same cock-and-bull story the Israelis produced back in 1985 when
they killed a two-man CBS crew, Tewfiq Ghazawi and Bahij Metni,
in southern Lebanon.
But there's a far more hateful bit of
denial and hypocrisy being played out now in the US over two
young and beautiful women. The first, Private Jessica Lynch,
is feted as an American heroine after being injured during the
American invasion of Iraq and then "rescued" from her
Iraqi hospital bed by US Special Forces. Now it just happens
that Private Lynch--far from firing at her Iraqi attackers until
the last bullet, as the Pentagon would have had us believe--was
injured in a road accident between two military trucks during
an ambush and that Iraqi doctors had been giving her special
care when Lynch's "rescuers" burst into her unguarded
hospital. But the second young American is a real heroine, a
girl called Rachel Corrie who stood in front of an Israeli bulldozer
that was about to demolish a Palestinian home and who was killed--wearing
a clearly marked jacket and shouting through a loudspeaker--when
the Israeli driver crushed her beneath his bulldozer and then
drove backwards over her body again. All this was filmed. As
a Jewish writer, Naomi Klein, bravely pointed out in The Guardian,
"Unlike Lynch, Corrie did not go to Gaza to engage in combat;
she went to try to thwart it." Yet not a single American
government official has praised Rachel Corrie's courage or condemned
her killing by the Israeli driver. President Bush has been gutlessly
silent. For their part, the Israeli government tried to smear
the activist group to which Rachel Corrie belonged by claiming
that two Britons later involved in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv
had attended a memorial service to her--as if the organisers
could have known of the wicked deed the two men had not yet committed.
But there's nothing new in smearing the
dead, is there? Back in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s,
I remember well how the British Army's press office at Lisburn
in Co Antrim would respond to the mysterious death of British
ex-soldiers or Englishmen who were inconveniently killed by British
soldiers. The dead were always described as--and here, reader,
draw in your breath--"Walter Mitty characters". I used
to get sick of reading this smear in Belfast Telegraph headlines.
Anonymous army officers would pass it along to the press. The
guy was a Walter Mitty, a fantasist whose claims could not be
believed. This was said of at least three dead men in Northern
Ireland.
And I have a suspicion, of course, that
this is where Tony Blair's adviser Tom Kelly first heard of Walter
Mitty and the ease with which authority could libel the dead.
Born and bred in Northern Ireland, he must have read the same
lies in the Belfast papers as I did, uttered by the same anonymous
army "press spokesmen" with as little knowledge of
Thurber as Mr Kelly himself when they spoke to journalists over
the phone. So from that dark war in Northern Ireland, I think,
came the outrageous smear against Dr David Kelly, uttered by
his namesake to a correspondent on The Independent.
So let us remember a few names this morning:
Ahmed Hanoun Hussein, Mazen Dana, Tewfiq Ghazawi, Bahij Metni,
Rachel Corrie and Dr David Kelly.
All they have in common is their mortality.
And our ability to deny their deaths or lie about why we killed
them or smear them when they can no longer speak for themselves.
Walter Mitty indeed!
Robert Fisk is
a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to Cockburn and
St. Clair's forthcoming book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 23 / 24, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Rumsfeld
Does Bogota
Robert Fisk
The Cemetery at Basra
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity
Insults to Intelligence
Andrew C. Long
Exile on Bliss Street: The Terrorist Threat and the English Professor
Jeremy Bigwood
The Toxic War on Drugs: Monsanto Weedkiller Linked to Powerful
Fungus
Jeffrey St. Clair
Forest
or Against Us: the Bush Doctor Calls on Oregon
Cynthia McKinney
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
David Krieger
So Many Deaths, So Few Answers: Approaching the Second Anniversary
of 9/11
Julie Hilden
A Constitutional Right to be a Human Shield
Dave Lindorff
Marketplace
Medicine
Standard Schaefer
Unholy Trinity: Falwell's Anti-Abortion Attack on Health and
Free Speech
Catherine Dong
Kucinich and FirstEnergy
José Tirado
History Hurts: Why Let the Dems Repeat It?
Ron Jacobs
Springsteen's America
Gavin Keeney
The Infernal Machine
Adam Engel
A Fan's Notations
William Mandel
Five Great Indie Films
Walt Brasch
An American Frog Fable
Poets' Basement
Reiss, Kearney, Guthrie, Albert and Alam
Website of the Weekend
The Hutton Inquiry
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