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March 26, 2004
Chris Floyd
The Pentagon Archipelago
Website of the Day
Dick
is a Killer
March 25, 2004
Lee Sustar
Who
is to Blame for Lost Jobs?
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Offshore Banking Centers
Roger Burbach
Lula vs. the IMF: Brazil Begins
to Throw Off the Austerity Planners
Jimmer Endres
Elections Without Politics: The Military Budget Is Not an "Issue"
Larry Tuttle
Acting in Your Name: Identity Theft and Public Interest Groups
Toni Solo
Misreporting Venezuela
Dan Bacher
A Memorial Wall for Iraq War's Dead and Wounded
Saul Landau
Is
Venezuela Next?
Website of the Day
The Spiral Railway
March 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
General
Musharraf's IOU
Richard Oxman
Shakespeare
for Kerry
William Lind
The Beginning
of Phase Three: 4G Warfare Hits Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul
Iraq One Year Later
Michael Dempsey
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
Alan Farago
The Bad Math of Mercury: Bush's War on the Unborn
Benjamin Dangl
and April Howard
Media
in Cuba
John L. Hess
No Lie Left Behind: Judy Miller Does Dick Clarke
Greg Weiher
Two Cheers for Dems: "We're Not as Bad as George"
Eva Golinger
An Open Letter to John Kerry on Venezuela
Grayson Childs
Where's Cynthia McKinney?
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
Website of the Day
The Bushiad and the Idiossey
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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
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March
26, 2004
The Man Who Knew Too Much
The
Ordeal of Mordechai Vanunu
By ROBERT FISK
The
Independent
Any Israeli who bought the 16 February edition
of the daily newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth would have believed that
a truly wicked man was about to be released from Ashkelon prison.
Each time a suicide bomber blew himself up, the prisoner would
celebrate. Worse still, said the paper, the inmate--once a keeper
of Israel's nuclear secrets--wants to endanger his country further
after his release. "He told me," a former prisoner
was quoted as saying, "that he has additional material and
that he will reveal secrets..."
Should it be a surprise, then, that the
very same prisoner, supposedly celebrating the slaughter of innocents
while preparing to betray his country yet again, holds a clutch
of awards from European peace groups, the Sean McBride Peace
prize and an honorary doctorate from the University of Tromso?
In 2000, the Church of Humanism told him: "You are honest,
courageous and morally highly motivated, and may the great sacrifice
you have made serve to protect not only those living in Israel
but all the peoples of the Middle East and perhaps the world."
The same man has also been put forward as a nominee for the Nobel
Peace Prize.
Mordechai Vanunu, it seems, can only
be loved or loathed. Indifference to the former Israeli nuclear
technician is impossible. For he is the man who, in 1986, took
evidence to The Sunday Times of the full story behind Israel's
secret nuclear weapons plant at Dimona in the Negev desert, complete
with the total number of advanced fission bombs there--200 at
the time--and, even more disturbingly, complete with pictures.
He said that Israel had mastered a  thermonuclear design and appeared to
have a number of thermonuclear bombs ready for use. He was subsequently
lured by a girl from London to Rome and then kidnapped, drugged
and freighted back to Israel by Israeli secret policemen. But
in just six weeks' time, after 18 years of imprisonment--12 of
them in solitary confinement--the world's most famous whistleblower
is scheduled for release. Israel--not to mention the world--is
holding its breath.
Will he divulge further secrets of Dimona--always
supposing he has any after 18 years of incarceration--or curse
the country of which he is a citizen, albeit a citizen who converted
to Christianity before his arrest and who wants to emigrate to
the United States? Will he emerge a cowed man, anxious only to
apologise for the terrible betrayal he inflicted upon his country?
Or will he, as his friends and supporters and his adopted American
parents hope, become an apostle of peace, one of the greatest
of this generation's prisoners of conscience, the man who tried
to rid the world of the threat of nuclear annihilation?
The Israeli government is still uncertain
how to confront Vanunu's release on 21 April. They are known
to be considering--perhaps have already decided upon--"certain
supervisory means" and "appropriate measures"
to shut Vanunu up. In the second half of January, Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon met with Menachem Mazuz, Israel's attorney general,
and the defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, and discussed whether
Vanunu should be refused a passport. Vanunu would be free to
sunbathe on the beaches of Tel Aviv but could not tour the world
advertising Israel's nuclear power. It's a sign of how fearful
the Israeli administration has become at the prospect of this
one man's release that Sharon also summoned to this conference
Yehiel Horev's so-called "Defence Ministry Security Unit",
the country's internal and external intelligence services--Shin
Beth and the equally overestimated Mossad--and a representative
of the Israeli Atomic Energy Committee.
Horev, it is now known, wanted to go
much further than Sharon. He proposed clapping an administrative
detention order on Vanunu--Israel's usual way of dealing with
Palestinians whom they regard as "terrorists"--although
the meeting apparently came to the conclusion that this would
only enhance Vanunu's reputation as a martyr for world peace.
There's another way of shutting Vanunu up, of course. He can
be publicly freed and then--the moment he starts talking about
his work as a nuclear technician--he can be tried again and thrown
back into Ashkelon jail--or Shikma prison, as the Israelis call
it now.
But the real problem that Vanunu represents
is that he will remind the world at a critically important moment
in the history of the Middle East that Israel is a nuclear power
and that its warheads stand ready to be fired from the Negev
desert. He will also remind the world that the Americans, despite
battering their way into Iraq to destroy Saddam Hussein's nonexistent
weapons of mass destruction, continue to give their political,
moral and economic support to a country that has secretly amassed
a treasure trove of weapons of mass destruction.
How can President Bush remain silent
on Israel's nuclear power when he has not only illegally invaded
an Arab state for allegedly harbouring nuclear weapons and condemned
Iran for the same ambitions, but also praised--along with Tony
Blair's government--Colonel Gaddafi of Libya for abandoning his
nuclear pretensions? If the Arab states are being "defanged"--always
supposing they had any real fangs in the first place--why should
Israel not be "de-nuclearised"? Why can't the United
States apply the same standards to Israel as it does to the Arabs?
Or why, for that matter, can't Israel apply the same standards
to itself that it demands of its Arab enemies?
This is the debate that the Israeli and
the American governments wish to stifle. In the United States,
where any discussion of the Israeli-American relationship that
deviates from the benign is routinely condemned as subversive
or "anti-Semitic", discussion of Israel's nuclear power
is not something that Washington will want to hear on the Sunday
talk shows. Vanunu, it should be said at once, is well aware
of all this, of his own importance--infinitely greater than it
was when he was a mere junior technician at Dimona--and of the
role that tens of thousands of anti- nuclear campaigners expect
him to play in the world. Many times, through friends and through
his own brothers, Vanunu has said that he has no new nuclear
secrets but has the right to oppose nuclear weapons in Israel
or anywhere else. "All I want to do is to go to America,
get married and start a new life," he says.
No one can doubt Vanunu's conviction.
Born in 1954 to a religious Jewish family in Morocco, he immigrated
to Israel at the age of nine, performed his military service
in the mid-Seventies and began work at Dimona in November 1976
while completing a graduate course in philosophy and geography.
Perhaps it was during his travels in Thailand, Burma, Nepal and
Australia in early 1986 that he decided he had a moral duty to
talk about Israel's nuclear weapons. In the same year, he was
baptised at an Anglican church in Sydney. Vanunu had clearly
become deeply distressed at Israel's growing nuclear power when
he walked into British newspaper offices in September of 1986
in the hope of telling the world the truth about Dimona. He had
dropped by Robert Maxwell's Daily Mirror at first, handed over
his photographs of the nuclear plant and waited for a reply.
Unknown to Vanunu, Maxwell sent the pictures round to the Israeli
embassy in London to "take a look at them", supposedly
to "confirm" whether or not the story was true. It
seems likely that Maxwell had motives other than journalistic
integrity in this betrayal of Vanunu. After his death at sea
in 1991, Maxwell, who had stolen millions in pensioners' funds,
was given a state funeral in Israel at which Shimon Peres praised
his "services" to the state.
Maxwell's Daily Mirror ran a "spoiler"
story on 28 September, belittling Vanunu and carrying the headline
"The Strange Case of Israel and the Nuclear Con Man."
The Sunday Times ran with the full story--but Vanunu had already
disappeared. Entrapped by a female Mossad agent, he had been
lured on to a British Airways flight to Rome and promptly kidnapped.
It seems, in fact, that he was seized inside Rome's Fiumicino
Airport. Unable to speak to journalists, he carefully wrote out
details of his movements on the palm of his hand and pressed
it to the window of his prison truck as it took him to court.
"Rome ITL 30:9:86 2100 came to Rome by BA504," he had
written. He had been kidnapped at 9pm on 30 September at Rome
International. Were the Italian authorities involved in his kidnap?
Were they present when he was seized? Perhaps Vanunu can tell
us.
He is certainly a man of endurance. Once,
during his 12 years of solitary, the prison authorities accidentally
freed him for exercise before Arab prisoners in the jail-yard
had been returned to their cells. Vanunu immediately walked towards
them. One of the Arabs, a Lebanese imprisoned for smuggling arms
into the West Bank, was among the first strangers to bring word
of Vanunu's appearance to the outside world. "Vanunu fell
into step with us and smiled at us and it was a time before we
realised who he was," the freed Lebanese later told The
Independent. "He said it was good to be with us and we thought
he was a brave man. Then the guards realised their mistake and
we were pushed and shoved away from him, back to our cells."
An Israeli journalist visiting another
prisoner was amazed to see Vanunu. "For a short moment I
saw a bucolic scene," he wrote, "as if taken from some
other reality: a serene man, sitting on a bench in a garden and
reading Nietzsche in English. I approached him and extended my
hand. Pleased to meet you, my name is Ronen,' I said. I'm Motti,'
the most confined prisoner in the State of Israel replied. Before
we could continue to talk, screaming wardens rushed over and
grabbed him away."
A former prisoner, Yossi Harush, has
provided another glimpse of the imprisoned Vanunu in the years
after his solitary confinement ended. "During the day,"
Harush told Yedioth Ahronoth, "during walks, he meets people
and talks with them. I spoke a lot with Vanunu. We were friends.
He would come to my cell... He has good conditions. He is treated
nicely in prison... He has no restrictions on leaving his cell,
but he is restricted within the prison. I myself, as a working
prisoner, painted a red line that he is forbidden to cross. I
was ordered to do that, and afterwards our relationship cooled
off."
Vanunu has been regularly visited by
an Anglican clergyman, Dean Michael Sellors. It was Sellors who
pointed out to him that his release date coincided with the Queen's
birthday. "He said that in that case, he'd better get a
ticket and greet her himself."
Vanunu has also taken heart in the actions
of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a normally conservative
organisation, which has stated that, "any sanctions against
Mordechai after release would be illegal and immoral." A
chatline on the Hebrew website of the Israeli daily Maariv shows
that a number of young Israelis regard Vanunu as a hero rather
than a threat. Mary Eoloff, a retired American school teacher
who, with her husband, adopted Vanunu in the hope that he could
be given US citizenship and released, was the first to reveal
that when Israeli security men offered to release him a year
before the expiry of his 18 years in jail, Vanunu turned them
down. "He believes in freedom of speech," she said.
It remains to be seen if Israel will
allow Vanunu the free speech he loves. Horev, the defence ministry
security official who attended Sharon's meeting, has spoken of
the threat that he believes the nuclear technician represents,
which seems to be about ambiguity rather than state secrets.
Horev compares this ambiguity to water in a glass. "My job
is to ensure that the water doesn't spill over the glass,"
he said recently. "Up until the Vanunu affair, the water
was at a very low level. The affair caused the water level to
rise significantly and caused Israel great damage, but the water
still didn't overflow. If we let certain people act in the matter,
the water will spill."
The Israeli journalist Raanan Shaked
was a good deal more cynical when he spoke on the subject on
Israel's Channel 10 TV. "Who is the main threat to Israel?"
he asked. "Of course, Mordechai Vanunu! He is the big danger.
Israeli democracy simply cannot withstand the impact of this
one man saying what every child knows: we have nuclear weapons."
On 21 April, when Vanunu is released,
we shall find out if the water is going to overflow--and whether
Vanunu will cross the red line painted so ominously on the floor
at the instruction of the authorities.
Robert Fisk is
a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity
the Nation. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch's
hot new book, The
Politics of Anti-Semitism.
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
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