Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
Now Available!
Today's
Stories
May
8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
May
7, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention
Facilities in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ahmad
Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien
Phu
Alexander
Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison)
Bell?
Mike
Whitney
The Price of Victory
Norman
Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial
M.
Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
Website
of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq
May
4, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations
and Responses
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture
David
Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq
Barry
Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers
Patrick
Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised
Dr.
Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say
Fidel
Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War
Mike
Whitney
Empire of Torture
Sonali
Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against
John Kerry
Josh
Frank
The Lost Sierra Club
Stan
Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq
Agustin
Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics
Stew
Albert
American Know-How
Website
of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up
May
3, 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
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.
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Weekend
Edition
May 8 / 9, 2004
Life with Dick
and Lynne
A Few Things
About the Cheneys
By LAURA FLANDERS
First Ladies Laura Bush and Lynne Cheney
(the wife of the Vice President) are the White House's Maria
Shriver. Unelected, supposedly not political they speak to the
"personal" side of their men. Just as Shriver attempted
to assure voters that the nasty stories about Arnold were only
movie-fun or rumor, so the first wives act as the Bush team's
character-witnesses. There's one for each Bush constituency and
they're summed up by their attitudes to literature: Laura Bush
said famously: "there's nothing political about American
literature." In contrast, it's Lynne Cheney's belief that
one book, (I Pierre Riviere, by Michel Foucault,) turned American
culture "away from reason and reality" and against
"Truth" itself. As you might have guessed, Laura speaks
to moderates; Lynne delights the Right.
It's hard to imagine the Terminator
Presidency without the culture wars that came before it, and
in those wars, Lynne Cheney was a key warrior. The social change
movements of the 1960s and '70s were cultural as well as political:
Gay Pride, Earth Day, Ms. Magazine, Black is Beautiful. |By the
start of the 1980s, white male domination was decidedly uncool
(and socially unpopular.) To prepare the ground for Bush's butch-swagger
and basket, a backlash had to turn all that around and from her
spot as the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities
from 1986-93, Cheney helped do the turning.
Conservative culture warrior
is an odd career outcome for a woman who started life as a baton
twirler and once penned a steamy lesbian romance, but Lynne Cheney,
throughout her life, has been nothing if not flexible. She has
a knack for fitting herself and her opinions to suit the opportunities
of her time. Born in 1941, in Casper Wyoming, Lynne (nee Vincent)
met Richard Bruce Cheney at Natrona County High School. Both
of their fathers worked for the
government, both of their mom's were liberated Western women:
Lynne's was a deputy sheriff--she had a badge, but no gun; Dick
Cheney's was an infielder on the Syracuse (Neb) Bluebirds, a
nationally ranked women's softball team in the 1930s.
In the 1950s, Vincent was a
bobby-sox girl. A straight-A student, the elected "Mustang
Queen," she took up baton-twirling, she has said, because
it was one of the few competitive sports available to girls,
and Lynne was nothing if not competitive. Lynne and "Dick"
graduated in 1959--the same year as the Rydell High gang made
famous in the movie "Grease." He wasn't quite the John
Travolta to her Olivia Newton John, but Cheney was class president
and captain of the football team and Vincent certainly knew how
to light up a stage. Dick would stand by her side with a coffee
can filled with water while she twirled batons, on fire at both
ends. He'd douse them when she was done.
During the 2000 race, Dick
Cheney commented to a reporter that he and Lynne might never
have met. "You'd be married to someone else now," he
said to her. "Right" she piped up. "And he'd be
running for vice president of the United States instead of you."
She's got a point. After high school, it was Dick, not Lynne
(the academic star,) who received a full scholarship to Yale
but after two failed attempts to make the grade, he dropped out,
returned to Wyoming, picked up two drunk-driving convictions,
and took a union job laying power lines for the local company.
It was Vincent (who was eager-beavering away at state colleges,
earning a BA and an MA in English,) who pestered Cheney to return
to school. Only after her graduation would she agree to marry,
("Dick should have finished college" too, she says,
but he "hadn't quite." )
The year was 1964 and marriage
was the thing to do--not least because the Vietnam War was on,
and marriage secured for Dick Cheney the first of several draft
deferments reserved for married men. After the draft expanded
to include married men without children, Cheney got another deferment
when Lynne gave birth to their first child -- nine months and
two days after the expansion-order was announced. (Cheney received
a total of five student and marriage deferments in all. He told
the Washington Post in '89, "I had other priorities in the
'60s than military service." )
By 1970, he was on his way
to a career in politics, and Lynne, now the mother of two, was
finding out how hard it was to be taken seriously in her own
right. Like many women, she didn't have to work, but she wanted
to. "I just never didn't work," she says, "When
we were married, and through moving and everything else, I have
always been teaching or writing." She'd written a very
serious dissertation on the effect of Immanuel Kant's philosophy
on the poetry of Victorian didact, Matthew Arnold. She liked
to write; she hated to cook. But finding rewarding employment
was not so easy. Her first ambition had been to be a movie star;
her second, a college professor. "This was before people
were enlightened about women and married women in particular,"
she told Fox News. A prospective employer asked her point-blank:
"Are you interested in the job, Dr. Cheney, or are you married?"
"That was illegal at the time," she comments. (Employers
didn't simply become "enlightened" after all, movements
mobilized and Congress passed laws.)
Cheney took up a more convenient
career for a politician's wife, that of writer. Her first book,
a political thriller titled Executive Privilege, came out in
1979. Her second, Sisters tapped directly into the feminist spirit
of the age.
The novel that today's Mrs.
Cheney leaves out of her official biography, came out in 1981,
from Signet, in a gloriously gothic paperback edition. Breathy
jacket copy promises "a novel of a strong and beautiful
woman who broke all the rules of the American frontier,"
and Sisters delivers on the promise. The star of the book is
a condom-carrying Wyoming woman who runs away from convent school
to join the theater, where she comes under the influence of a
music-hall celebrity who teaches her how to "enjoy"
men, but not get "trapped..."
Lynne Cheney, having had her
fun with feminism, then signed up to join the anti-feminist backlash.
Sexual liberation, unmarried couples, even family planning--by
the middle of the 1980s, Sophie's values read like a catalogue
of all that the Reagan GOP was against. A 1986 report authored
by Gary Bauer, then Under Secretary for Education, laid out the
state's interest in the male-headed heterosexual, married family:
"Attitudes to work are formed in families" declared
the report. Families "prepare skilled and energetic workers
who are the engine for democratic capitalism." Based on
Bauer's report, Executive Order 12606, (signed in 1987,) required
that "federal agencies must assess [the] impact on [the]
family when formulating and implementing policies and regulations."
In the name of "family values," (the words were just
then gaining resonance), the Reagan revolutionaries were out
to reverse every trend that encouraged independent, wage-earning
moms, unmarried parenting, divorce, protected sex, and non-nuclear
arrangements of every kind. Sisters was definitely off the reading
list.
Meanwhile, Dick was a rising
star in the Republican House. (He was elected Wyoming's only
Congressman in '78 after a race in which Lynne did six weeks'
of his campaigning, when he suffered his first heart attack).
He voted against busing and the establishment of a federal Department
of Education, against reauthorizing the Legal Services Corporation
(which offers free legal aid to the poor,) against the Panama
Canal Treaty (of course,) the Equal Rights Amendment and the
imposition of sanctions on apartheid South Africa. Lynne, who
now says she is more conservative than her husband, found a niche
for herself, too.
Excerpted from the New York
Times bestseller, Bushwomen:
Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso Books.) "The Laura
Flanders Show" can be heard weekends, 7-10 pm on Air America
Radio.
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
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