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HOW MITT ROMNEY DODGED THE DRAFT — H. Bruce Franklin remembers Romney from his Stanford days and lays out exactly how he and his father ensured he would evade service in the war which, at Stanford, he was demonstrating for. Andrew Cockburn gives CounterPunchers a compelling investigation of the rise of automated warfare and of the Drones, their vast costs and constant failures. Wei Zhang assesses the social and health costs of China’s incredible GDP growth.
Archives from September 2001
I deliberately raised this question as the caption of this commentary to underscore some points. To be sure, it is not a suggestion of culpability of Africans regarding the September 11 terror but more of a challenge to come to terms with the the interconnectednes...
The Independent The US will strike at Osama bin Laden’s supply bases “in days rather than weeks” a senior opposition leader in northern Afghanistan, in daily contact with Washington, predicted yesterday. Abdullah Abdullah, foreign ministe...
A New Kind of War If you’re mystified as to what U.S. officials envisage when they talk of a long war to be fought on many fronts by many means, you would do well to read what the big boys are reading. The Rosetta Stone for discerning the Bush adminis...
People fled their homes in Kabul yesterday fearing a US air attack when they heard Taliban anti-aircraft gunners open fire. It turned out to be a military exercise. The opening of an air offensive is expected to lead to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of refuge...
In the 17 days since two planes flew into the World Trade Center, a third plane flew into the Pentagon and a fourth plane crashed in Pennsylvania, I have read the same story, in different news sources, attempting to create a language that adequately describes the ...
We’ve been surprised, listening to some friends and acquaintances in Humboldt county, northern California, and up in Portland, Oregon, who say they’re afraid. Afraid of what, we ask. In this case, after that crime against humanity known as the September 11 att...
For the seven million Americans who are Muslims (only two million of them Arab) and have lived through the catastrophe and backlash of 11 September, it’s been a harrowing, especially unpleasant time. In addition to the fact that there have been several Arab ...
Exploding shells twinkle over a hilltop in northern Afghanistan as opposition soldiers try to show that one day they will have the strength to overthrow the Taliban in Kabul. A line of soldiers advances on the enemy’s position and flushes out a single prisoner. ...
In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US, citizens have begun to ask “how could this happen?” Among the several complexly twisted roots of the crisis are America and the industrial world’s ongoing and worsening energy insecurit...
The table is set, at least so far as the tools of war are concerned; enormous quantities of American men, machines, and ordnance now stand ready to strike at any number of potential targets around the Middle East. Any day now is the word from Washington. But meantime ther...
Before the September 11 attacks, vice president Dick Cheney was set to quit. President George Bush was preparing to nominate Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge as Cheney’s successor. A prominent Philadelphia businessman and close friend of Pennsylvania g...
Jawid smiles nervously as he recounts his escape from a Taliban jail and his flight across the front line to safety in territory held by the Afghan opposition. A taxi driver in Kabul, Jawid, 21, was arrested two weeks ago at a Taliban checkpoint in the city. His cr...
When Christopher Hitchens supports a Western war he usually concentrates his fire on the ‘enemy’. During the Falklands escapade he wasn’t bothered by the sinking of the Belgrano or other such trivia that ‘liberal twits’ were questioni...
If there is one place on earth where the news of the attacks in America was greeted with total enthusiasm it was among the 300 Taliban prisoners of war held in a jail in the depths of the Panjshir Valley. “To my mind what happened in New York and Washington w...
Much airtime and bandwidth has been devoted to the “brilliance” of the elaborately-planned and well-executed September 11 terrorist strikes on New York and Washington. Some of the commentary has sounded almost breathless with admiration for the daring and co-o...
Bush is Wall Street’s president. His top advisers are all former CEO’s, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Don Evans and Paul O’Neill. Thus it’s not surprising that the administration has chosen to build its revenge coalition through a...
Samuel Huntington’s evil desire for a clash between civilizations may well come true after Tuesday’s terror attacks. The crack that divided Muslims everywhere from the rest of the world is no longer a crack. It is a gulf, that if not bridged, will sure...
Once a war criminal, once a US senator, now president of the New School, Bob Kerrey joined CNN’s Paula Zahn as for commentary Monday morning. Zahn made chaste reference to Kerrey’s expertise in military affairs. This plunges us straight into the fierce...
Was it really bin Laden? The question is moot. The U.S. needs a face to put on the enemy as it prepares to retaliate for the suicide bombings of September 11, and he’s our man. The Bush administration announced late Sunday that it would soon release a briefi...
On the frontline facing the Taliban north of Kabul yesterday, a plump Afghan artillery officer called Commander Mustapha was expecting the war to worsen in the immediate future. “Either the Talibs will attack again, or we will,” he said cheerfully. Comm...
“When in despair I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won; there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time they can seem invincible, but in the end they always fall.” M.K. Gandhi Understandably, after the tragedy in Ne...
I never know when the phone will ring and it’ll be my old friend, Leon Despair, calling from who knows where. just when I least expect it. This time the phone rang at 2:30 a.m. He had some questions for me, and they couldn’t wait till morning. Leon can...
News from Tashkent, Uzbekistan comes to us that US military aircraft landed at a military airport yesterday. The first installment of bombers is poised to blast Afghanistan from the map, to render the region into the parking lot of Lyndon Johnson’s fantasy. ...
Complete CounterPunch Coverage of September11 Attacks
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It is odd to hear a U.S. secretary of defense borrow metaphors from Mao Tse-tung during a Washington press briefing. But it is frightening when that metaphor is turned on its head to announce matter-of-factly that the most powerful nation on earth intends t...