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New Edition of CounterPunch The Return of Robert Rubin: Kerry, Jobs and the Economy by Alexander Cockburn; Party Favors: the Political Business of Terry McAuliffe by Jeffrey St. Clair; The Kill Zone: Caring for the Wounded in Fallujah by David Martinez. In March, CounterPunch Online was read by 15.4 million viewers--by far our biggest month ever. But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 Cockburn and Chomsky at MIT

Cockburn / St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War Now Available! Today's Stories May 1 / 2, 2004 Virginia Tilley Let the Wall of Silence Fall May 1 / 2, 2004 Patrick Cockburn An Army in Disgrace, a Policy in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat Robert Fisk "Good Guys" Who Can Do No Wrong Alexander Cockburn Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders, Useless Spies, Angry World Heather Williams Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin American Troops Flee Iraq Diane Rejman An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq: Abu Ghraib as My Lai? Diane Christian Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and Sharon Speak the Same Language Patrick Cockburn Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah Dave Lindorff Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked, Shocked, Shocked Chris Floyd Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists and Annihilation April 29 / 30, 2004 Dave Zirin A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome Death of Pat Tillman Kathy Kelly The Warden's Tour Greg Weiher Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the Banality of Evil Michael S. Ladah Terrorism and Assassination: the Ultimate Depception Patrick Cockburn The Fallujah Mutinies April 28, 2004   April 28, 2004 Christopher Brauchli Meet Congressman Know-Nothing: Tom Tancredo Wendy Brinker The Politics of the Numb Faisal Kutty The Dirty Work of Canadian Intelligence John Chuckman Seeking the Evil One Mike Whitney Flag-Draped Coffins and the Seattle Times Tom Mountain Rwanda and the F***** Word Graeme Greenback The Iraqi Alamo: a CNN/CIA Production Tracy McLellan The War Comes Home M. Junaid Alam We are the Barbarians William Loren Katz Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson April 27, 2004 James Davis The Colombia 3 Acquitted Dave Lindorff Chalabi as Prosecutor Bruce Schneier Terrorist Threats and Political Gain Cockburn / Sengupta British Generals Resist Calls for More Troops to Aid Americans in Iraq Walt Brasch Presidential Letters: The Day I Was Asked to Feed an Elephant Saul Landau The Empire in Denial and the Denial of Empire April 26, 2004 Patrick Cockburn Crossing the Shia Line: US Troops Prepare to Enter Najaf Wayne Madsen Trading Places: Will the US Go the Way of the USSR? Grover Furr Protest, Rebellion, Commitment Elaine Cassel Lies About the Patriot Act Mickey Z. Inspired by Pat Tillman? Greg Moses Bremer's De-De-Ba'athjfication Gambit Gila Svirsky Anarchy in Our Souls Uri Avnery Vanunu and the Terrible Secret April 24 / 25, 2004 William A. Cook Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry and Bush Melt into One Jeffrey St. Clair Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank Brandy Baker A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So Robert Fisk A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free Speech Ben Tripp October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios Nelson Valdés "Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg Lucson Pierre-Charles Haiti's Return to the Future Kurt Nimmo The CIA Killed Pat Tillman Mark Scaramella Does Anybody Know Anything? Patrick Cockburn The Return of Saddam's Generals Gary Engler Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas Col. Dan Smith Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush Greg Weiher Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam... Elaine Cassel Life on the Outside: a Review Vanessa Jones Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney Jim French Agriculture's Bullied Market Hammond Guthrie Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles Poets' Basement Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella April 23, 2004 Ron Jacobs The Only Solution is Immediate Withdrawal Dave Lindorff Imagination Deficit Disorder Mokhiber / Weissman Contractors and Mercenaries: the Rising Corporate Military Monster Norman Solomon Country Joe Band, 2004: "What Are We Fighting For?" Cynthia McKinney All Things Are Not Equal: the Perils of Globalization CounterPunch Wire A Bitch Called Wanda Karyn Strickler Sierra Club, Inc. Hammond Guthrie Yellow Caked in the Face Paul de Rooij Graveyard of Justifications: Glossary of the Iraqi Occupation April 22, 2004 Patrick Cockburn When Terror Came to Basra: "I Saw a Minibus of Children on Fire" Tanya Reinhart The Wall Behind Disengagement Lance Selfa Why is Kucinich Still in the Race? Josh Frank Street Fighting Man? Kucinich's Pulled Punches Sen. Robert Byrd Bush Owes America Answers on Iraq William S. Lind Why We Get It Wrong Mickey Z. Undoing the Latches Robert Jensen Why They Fast: Remembering the Victims of the World Bank John L. Hess The New York Times from 30,000 Feet April 21, 2004 Gary Leupp Yeats on Iraq Alfredo Castro Colombia's Forgotten Prisoners Dr. Susan Block Bush's Taliban Drug Deal William A. Cook George 1 to George 2 Jack Random Iraq and Vietnam Jean-Guy Allard Alarcon Meets the Editors Mike Whitney Charade in the Desert Bill Christison Only Major Policies Changes Can Help Washington Now   April 20, 2004 Dave Lindorff Bush and Kerry Share a Problem Stan Cox Wal-Mart's Magic Numbers Bruce Anderson On Listening to Air America Joseph Kalvoda Czech Mate for Condi Greg Moses Yesterday's Intelligence Stan Goff The Democrats and Iraq Website of the Day Santorum Happens     April 19, 2004 Kurt Nimmo The "Central Hand" of the Resistance Mike Whitney Bob Woodward's Imperial Trifles Douglas Valentine 52 Pick-Up and the 100-to-1 Rule John Chuckman The Sharon Annex: Evil Does Often Triumph Doug Giebel Welcome to the Club Rahul Mahajan Hospital Closings and War Crimes   April 16 / 18, 2004 Robert Fisk Bush Legitimizes Terror Saul Landau Subverting Brazil and Cuba Dave Lindorff Paying for War: $2,150 per Family and Counting Brandy Baker Fallujah's Collateral Damage Mickey Z. The Left Attacks from the Right Bruce Jackson The Bush Press Conference: Gott Mit Uns Norman Solomon How the "NewsHour" Changed History Alexander Cockburn Bush, Kerry and Empire   April 15, 2004 Greg Moses Follow the Families, Not the Script Virginia Tilley The Carnage According to Gen. Kimmitt: Just Change the Channel Ron Jacobs They Coulda Been Champions of the World: Hurricane Carter and Ron Kovic Michael Neumann A Happy Compromise: Hate Crimes Reporting in the Toronto Globe and Mail   April 14, 2004 Tom Reeves Return to Haiti: an American Learning Zone Reza Fiyouzat Japan and Iraq Ron Jacobs What Bush Really Said Diane Christian The Real Passion   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.     Subscribe Online

May 3, 2004 Torture, Incorporated Let the Wall of Silence Fall By VIRGINIA TILLEY The hooded figure stands Christ-like, arms out, frozen in place by the snaking wires that he was told would kill him if his bare feet left the small box on which he is poised. Chosen for publicity because his nakedness is actually covered with some filthy rag, he is emblazoned on every newspaper in the world. Other photos are worse: a mound of naked men, obscenely intertwined for laughing torturers; leering American soldiers pointing imaginary weapons at prisoners' genitals. And those not published are even worse: men forced to simulate sex acts with each other, or to masturbate before their guards. Staring at these images, an entire aghast international community recalls dehumanizations pursued by the worst regimes in history. Arab-Muslim sensitivities to nakedness give these scenes-flanked by the leering female US soldier-an additional dimension of shame and horror. But what exactly does this faceless man symbolize-besides the moral rot filtering through the foundations of the US occupation? The whole package of abuse in Abu Ghuraib Prison is being soothingly denounced by US generals and the Bush administration as an "aberration." Hence we have just one mealy line from Bush: that he is "deeply offended" but certain that "this is not who we are"-as though we have been attacked by outsiders. For admitting that the US occupation truly commanded these things would instantly discredit our claim to bring enlightenment to the benighted Arab world. Worse, admitting that what we do is part of who we are would undermine Bush's divinely charged vision in our inherent cultural superiority, which-in his colonial mind-legitimizes our grant mission to enlighten the world. But in posturing this indignant denial, the Bush administration is lying, again. They knew, months ago, that trouble was up. And they knew that it went deeper than the few soldiers in these photos, now being scape-goated. The US crimes in Abu Ghuraib Prison were not at all aberrant. For one thing, torture and abuse of prisoners has been happening at US detention centers all over Iraq, and were happening while General Kimmitt-who knew about them months ago-angrily affirmed to journalists and the US public the fine upstanding character of the US military. More importantly, as Seymour Hersh has recently exposed, the actions of these grinning soldiers reflected their obedience to orders by the intelligence services, and implemented partly by private contractors, to use shame and terror on random prisoners in the hope of extracting information. The rot did not stem from a few young soldiers left to their own devices; it was embedded in an occupation ill-designed, poorly run, and poorly supervised, which allowed a hidden intelligence process to spin wildly away from the laws of war and violate all moral standards shared by the international community. Nor is that program itself aberrant, a peculiar twist of criminal behavior arising from a hidden intelligence apparatus. Sloppy supervising, insufficient staffing and inexperienced soldiers have been generating a whole host of country-wide abuses, documented and denounced by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which are heavily responsible for that rising Iraqi anger and hatred which the Bush administration tries to blame on "foreign agitators" and al-Qaida. Thousands of suspects are being held without trial, suspects are routinely beaten, soldiers shoot civilians-accidentally, or accidentally-on-purpose-with impunity at checkpoints, in searches, and in firefights. The lack of rules-or enforcement of rules, or knowledge or respect of the rules of war-is endemic. The whole Iraq theater is collapsing in a lethal interplay of US arrogance and incompetence, ad-hoc decision-making steered by hard-line logics, and a casual disdain for international standards which leaves the military rudderless in Fallujah and Najaf. The plumes of flame rising from Fallujah indicate a military in charge of itself; thrashing efforts to disengage-an old Saddam-era general briefly resurrected and as quickly cast aside-reveal the US government as a headless octopus. Long lost is the old adage that war is too important to be left to the generals: there is no civilian authority-i.e., a capable president-containing them. The US population has been dangerously insulated from the crimes in Iraq, and remains insulated by top-level denial that these latest terrible photos signal anything substantial about the occupation. In an especially insidious twist, the Bush administration has been playing on Vietnam syndrome in holding any critical regard of our soldiers as unpatriotic: consequently, the media and much of the country has absorbed a collective decision to lavish only praise, to "support our fine men and women" who are doing a "fabulous job" and "deserve our support." Yet that ethos, generous in spirit, has translated into a wall of silence which has fostered rampant ignorance about Iraqi-civilian suffering at US hands and the implications of these abuses for the US role, and has forestalled any sober collective effort to correct them. Hence the relatively muted US response to these dreadful photos reflects a great national confusion and in-drawing of breath, as the population is confronted by photos which are, to many sheltered people, so unexplainable, and whose very discussion has no moral standing in the current national climate-except to reject as an aberration. Instead of absorbing that a moral rot pervades the occupation, the US population is therefore likely to find baffling, extremist or even absurd the scandalized reactions of the Arab world and in Europe, for whom the photos are the US occupation's moral death-knell. For of course, as an aberration, these crimes imply nothing about our larger mission and certainly not our culture, right? The irony here is that, if these photos had instead portrayed American soldiers abused in some Arab prison, screaming right-wing US media would have waved them as substantiating every racist claim of inherent Arab depravity. On Fox News, ranks of flunky intellectuals would have soberly propounded the social-psychological violence inherent in Muslim theology and the "Arab mind"; tears of patriotic passion would have celebrated US military might as the golden force opposing the dark ferocity of the savage Arab masses. Feeble liberal protest-that it is wrong to extrapolate from one prison policy to a whole culture-would have been derided and silenced. And high-minded speeches would have emerged from the White House, mustering US patriotic zeal to combat these forces of evil which produced such an outrage. Yet when others launch similar stereotyping distortions of us, we claim the high ground: those ignorant savage Arabs, we sneer, with no conception of our culture. How gullible and backward they are, to fail to grasp the truth and be so enflamed. It must be al-Jazeera's fault. This scandal itself, however, does present an opportunity stemming from one genuine difference between the old and new regimes in Iraq. The photos are glaringly reminiscent of practices under Saddam Hussein, but the publicity is not. It was US soldiers who gamboled around naked terrified prisoners and snapped pictures of their own broad grins; it was other soldiers who were able to leak the photos to press outlets quick to print them and engage a horrified international community. Seymour Hersh has put the pieces together; the fuller story is coming out. Human progress is defined by such shaky remedial measures to limit barbarism, and, for all their hypocrisy and self-delusions, the Western democracies can be recognized for their weak and flawed struggles toward confronting their own repeated failures. Let this revelation impel one of those nobler collective efforts; let the wall of silence fall. Virginia Tilley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She can be reached at: tilley@hws.edu Weekend Edition Features for April 24 / 25, 2004 William A. Cook Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry and Bush Melt into One Jeffrey St. Clair Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank Brandy Baker A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So Robert Fisk A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free Speech Ben Tripp October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios Nelson Valdés "Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg Lucson Pierre-Charles Haiti's Return to the Future Kurt Nimmo The CIA Killed Pat Tillman Mark Scaramella Does Anybody Know Anything? Patrick Cockburn The Return of Saddam's Generals Gary Engler Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas Col. Dan Smith Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush Greg Weiher Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam... Elaine Cassel Life on the Outside: a Review Vanessa Jones Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney Jim French Agriculture's Bullied Market Hammond Guthrie Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles Poets' Basement Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella WWW http://www.counterpunch.org   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /