Exclusively in the new print issue of CounterPunch
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 January 2004
"It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating t...
"We must continue to stand with the brave people of Cuba, who for nearly half a century have endured tyrannies and repression." President G.W. Bush, Summit of the Americas, Monterrey, January 12, 2004 Th...
After holding them prisoner for almost two years, the United States has released three "enemy combatants," boys ages 13 to 15, captured in Afghanistan and held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Reluctantly, no doubt, Bush and Rumsfeld had to return the boys to Af...
Truth is the only safe ground to stand upon. – Elizabeth Cady Stanton At the debate last night, John Kerry, asked to give examples of the administration’s deceptiveness on the "war on terrorism," said ...
The Hutton report gave an immediate political victory to the Blair government. But the all-embracing natu...
"We were all wrong" David Kay We can finally put Weapons of Mass Destruction issue to rest. With the publishing of the Kay report it is clear that the entire pretense for the Iraq war was nothing more than ...
Hardly had the words "unfairly maligned" escaped Dick Cheney’s lips when his former company found itself neck-deep in yet another bribery scandal. Halliburton praised itself for "strong internal detective work" as it revealed the latest &...
Many observers were taken aback in recent days by the president’s unanticipated call for the U.S. to go to the Moon and Mars. However, sources have recently revealed the true provenance of the farsighted Bush plan. The president had hoped to spare the Americ...
Imagine yourself out driving one evening. It can be in any of the fifty states. Suddenly you hear a siren behind you. You simultaneously turn down the music you’re listening to and look in the rear-view mirror. Those blinking blue lights are right behind you...
When I was young, I never imagined I would one day stand in front of 250 people and say something nice about John Ehrlichman. And yet, as a PowerPoint image of him appeared behind me on a stage last November, there I was saying, "In the Nixon White Hou...
So the results are in. After shellacking Dean in Iowa, Kerry once again won a very convincing victory in New Hampshire. Democrats who made up their minds last year tended to favor Dean, while those who made up their minds in the last four weeks favored Kerry; thos...
The facial topography of Senator John Kerry–gravity and the exactions of time pulling his features inexorably southward, a forlorn Hawthornian feel to the whole ensemble–remind us of another conqueror of New Hampshire in 1972: Senator Ed Muskie of Main...
Statement before Judge G. Mallon Faircloth, who sentenced me to 3 months in federal prison after I pled not guilty but stipulated to the facts of a charge for a November 22, 2003 entry onto Fort Benning, an open US military base in Columbus, GA. Columbus, G...
My fellow American media consumers: At a time when news cycles bring us such portentous events as the remarkable wedding of Britney Spears, the advent of Michael Jackson’s actual trial proceedings and the start of the Democratic preside...
The specter of race in Texas higher education was raised inside and outside the state as soon as the King holiday weekend was over. A campus task force at the University of Texas at Austin found new reasons to take race seriously. And a long-term study from Prince...
After 17 months observing pacification efforts in Vietnam as a state department official, I laid eyes upon an unmistakable enemy for the first time on New Year’s Day in 1967. I was walking point with three members of a company from the US army’s 25th D...
Oriental Palace Hotel, Baghdad Recently I interviewed singer, songwriter and musician, Bruce Cockburn, at the end of his weeklong visit to Iraq hosted by the American Friends Service Committee. As I write this introduction in a Baghdad hotel on Karrada Stre...
So what did happen to Mad Doctor Dean and the Democrat joy-boys, Kerry and Edwards, in the wild Midwest? The media had anointed Dean, the rural governor from Wall Street, as the Democratic front-runner, but that’s not what the Iowa caucuses decided. Why not?...
[Editor's Note: The following is an email exchange between CounterPuncher STEVE PHILION and CNN's Aaron Brown, which took place after Brown's January 25th interview with David Kay, the Quixotic weapons inspector whose quest turned up nothing.] Steve: Mr. B...
Howard Dean often talks tough about environmental protection and renewable energy expansion. But his gubernatorial record stands in glaring opposition to his rhetoical posture. In fact during five campaigns for governor in Vermont, the mainstream environmental gro...
Lives without lives praying at mosque five times a day, undoubtedly praying for liberation, and daily life without the spreading toxic sand of unrelenting war and disparity etching the dawn and furrowed brow of every survivor in a land where th...
As an artist I would like to declare that I was delighted with the Israeli ambassador’s reaction last week in Sweden. I was thrilled with Sharon’s response and the Jewish outrage. Art is there to provoke. It isn’t there to please; nor is it there...
"I don’t think they existed. What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the [1991] Gulf War and I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the ’90s." Chief American arms ...
When Rand Beers quit his job as counter-terrorism advisor to President Bush, and signed up with John Kerry’s presidential campaign, he quickly became a hero to Democratic Party loyalists and the "Anybody but Bush" crowd. But Beers, who has become K...
At the height of the shortage of petrol in Baghdad a month ago people queued in their cars for as long as 18 hours outside petrol stations. One reason for the lack of petrol was that much of it was being stolen by black marketeers.
One day...