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 May 2004
The Bush administration and its fellow travelers struggled to make the case for war against Iraq. They tried and retried various arguments including Iraq’s supposed development of weapons of mass destruction, its violation of U.N. resolutions, its hypothesiz...
When Washington set out to pave the way for a full-scale invasion of Iraq, it did so by pointing to Baghdad’s failure to fully comply with UN Resolutions. The Baghdad regime, declared US President George W. Bush, was defying the UN. You would think the US ha...
The photos from Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison are snapshots, not of simple brutality or a breakdown in discipline, but of CIA torture techniques that have metastasized, over the past 50 years, like an undetected cancer inside the US intelligence community. ...
The Bush administration sent a calculated message to grassroots political activists this week: The War on Terrorism has come home. FBI agents rounded up seven American political activists from across the country Wednesday morning, and the U.S. Attorney̵...
Most US citizens don’t reflect on the reasons for anti-American sentiment throughout much of the world. But policy makers once focused precisely on this theme. In 1947, George Kennan, who headed policy planning for the State Department, assumed this antipath...
So, Bush’s big, "compassionate" solution to the systemic problem of amped-up American torture and the tragic folly of his War on Iraq is to destroy Abu Ghraib Prison. Of course, he probably should have done that a long time ago. While he let the mu...
MENDOCINO COUNTY has one "media" — this one. No, I’m not bragging; that’s the way it is here and one "media" is a simple statement of fact. We have a more or less benign DA, a laughable bunch of judges with the possible except...
It is a bit of historical data rarely quoted by Fox News or CNN as they clank out soundbite-sized backgrounders on terrorism: Many of America’s Islamic enemies were custom-made to order by the CIA and Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence Director...
"As events in wartime have clearly shown, our mentality is distinguished by the shameless naïveté with which we judge our enemy, and in the judgment we pronounce upon him we unwittingly reveal our own defects: we simply accuse our ene...
Al Gore’s May 26 speech at New York University pointed the finger at the Bush Administration for its bald-faced violations of international law. Bush "decided not to honor the Geneva Convention. Just as he would not honor the United Nations, internation...
June 6, 2004 marks 60 years since the fabled Allied invasion known as "D-Day." Lost amid the self-congratulatory orgy is the minor detail that by the time of the D-Day invasion, the Soviets were engaging 80 percent of the German Army on the Eastern Front...
"If this man were not an evildoer, We would not have handed him over." John: 18:30 You and the CIA both have your cute little mottos. "All the news that’s fit to print," you mumble, behind...
Interviewed at the new WWII monument as Memorial Day Weekend 2004 got underway, former Senator Bob Dole told CNN that "young men and young women make great sacrifices." Funny how the unintended truth comes right out of Washington mouths, if you listen fo...
Amid important corrections about Carole King’s high school and the spelling of a Pixar executive’s name, Times editors at last saw fit to mention the paper’s coverage of Iraq in the months preceding the war. After a modest round of self-congratul...
One Marine Corps motto is First to Fight, and this essay is intended to give a glimpse of the culture of those who claim that right. A Marine buddy of mine and I were engaged in discussion today over the validity of the current war in Iraq. My friend, being a comb...
Where does Memorial Day come from? Why do we celebrate it? Memorial Day began as a holiday called Decoration Day. It was established on May 5, 1868 by an organization of Union veterans: the Grand Army of the Republic. Although almost certainly a coincidence...
Tillman Likely Killed by Friendly Fire Associated Press article in NY Kingston Freeman, May 30, 2004. Former NFL defensive back Pat Tillman, 27, walked away from a $3.6 million contract with the Arizona Cardinals to join the Army follo...
Eddie Mustafa Muhammad is a former World Boxing Association (WBA) Light Heavyweight Champion who retired in 1988 with a lifetime mark of 50-8-1 (39 kayos). Today Mr. Muhammad is taking on a far bigger foe: the entrenched exploitation of fighters in Professional Bo...
Kojouri: Despite the fact that Iran has been clearly cooperating with International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the US has continuously accused Iran of violating Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Why is that? Fayazmanesh: I personally do not know th...
The thing that really gets my goat – and we’re talking about one of those big, shaggy goats with horns the size of a man’s arm and unblinking reptilian eyes, not some diminutive frog-belly from the petting zoo – is all this codswallop about...
Everyone knows by now (or should) that the Patriot Act allows the FBI to conduct surveillance on Internet and email usage. Using so-called National Security Letters (NSLs), the FBI directs Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to provide passwords and identifying info...
ABU SIFFA, IRAQ. "How could this happen?" nearly everyone asks these days. But as the U.S. now releases hundreds of men from Abu Ghraib prison, another question, "why were so many Iraqis locked up there in the first place?" is likely to ...
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." - Lord Acton (1834-1902), 1887 How often have we parrotted that well-known phrase without having any concrete understanding of what Lord Acton reall...
Rafael Rodiguez Cruz is a civil rights lawyer in the US town of Hartford in Connecticut. He is a board member of the Rosenberg Fund for Children and has visited one of the Cuban Five, Rene Gonzalez Sehwerert, who was condemned to 15 years imprisonment in the feder...
It was afternoon in India, forty years ago on May 27, when news came of Jawaharlal Nehru’s death. Few things have stunned India in a similar manner, before or since. For seventeen years, the Prime Minister had led India with a mixture of vision, charm, bomba...