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 March 2005
Instanbul. When I first came to live in Istanbul nearly twenty years ago there were only two television channels and a couple of radio stations, all state-run. Films were censored, and the Turkish music scene was conventional to say the least, with few pop ...
Kathmandu. King Gyanendra has ta...
Jerusalem. The fatal flaw in mos...
You’ve just started your new job and you’re eager to fit into the workplace and make a good impression on everyone. You make a friendly comment to the person who works next to you, but she responds: "Don’t bother, yid, I don’t make fri...
Many antiwar leaders blamed John Kerry’s defeat on the antiwar movement’s failure to connect with America’s conservative "heartland"–and have since followed Democratic Party liberals as they tack rightward to orient to this target...
It was like mainlining adrenaline cut with Mello Yello. If you came of age in the 1980′s and liked sports, the NCAA basketball tournament pushed a combination of suspense and drama that was impossible to resist. Every year our young jaws dropped a little low...
London. The crucial events that ...
I just read a news report from Ramadi, Iraq that detailed an armed takeover of a hospital there by US forces. It seems that there was an explosion in the town and the soldiers invaded the hospital, interrupting medical care, including a caesarian section, and hold...
On March 9, 2005, police forces in Guatemala City fired tear gas and beat demonstrators who were protesting the ratification of the U.S.-Central America Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). President Oscar Berger deployed 500 soldiers wielding truncheons to the city̵...
One mark of our soulless New American Century is the lack of respect for saintly madmen. By that I mean holy seers of the Blakean-Coleridge stripe that could be found on America’s streets as recently as the hippy era. The kind of crazy adept and enlightened ...
"In my 35 years as a conservationist, I have never beheld such a bleak and depressing situation as I see today. The evidence for my despair falls into three categories: the state of Nature, the power of anticonservationists, and appeasement and w...
The Bush administration’s decision to sell 25 F-16s to Pakistan was balanced by its decision to offer India 125 upgraded F-16s or F-18s and broader cooperation in systems for military command and control, early-warning detection, and missile defence. Washing...
In the last three decades, there always has been little doubt in my mind that democratic institutions would soon replace or subsume the world’s last remaining monarchies, including those in the Middle East. Monarchs could rule effectively when the wor...
A commission appointed by President Bush to analyze intelligence failures will be releasing its report tomorrow, Thursday, March 31. According to The New York Times the report "includes a searing critique of how the C.I.A. and other agencies never properly as...
Just as the Bush administration contemplates ordering up a new generation of nuclear weapons, which may in turn spark a new round of nuclear testing in the high deserts of Nevada, the Center for Disease Control, a federal outpost in Atlanta charged with supervisin...
The self-styled "Fighting Illini" of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are on their way to the NCAA Final Four in St. Louis with their racist and genocidal sports teams mascot, Chief Illiniwak, still in tow. In his "Year 501: The Conque...
On February 3, 2005, President George Bush, with Karl Rove watching, found himself speaking in Great Falls, Montana. It was billed as a "town meeting" and Bush was complimentary and gracious: ("Beautiful town full of great people. I was touched by t...
The March 15th conviction of WorldCom’s Bernie Ebbers on charges relating to fraud of US$11 billion is another example of a long tradition of capitalist scapegoating. Ebbers and Ken Lay of Enron and the other protagonists of the last wave of corporate fraud ...
"We are going to build a different kind of Middle East, a different kind of broader Middle East that is going to be stable and democratic and where our children will one day not have to be worried about the kind of ideologies of hatred that led t...
"The utmost grace the Greeks could show When to the Trojans they grew kind Was with their arms to let em go, And leave their lingering wives behind. They beat the men and burnt the town, Then all the baggage was their own. "Grecian Ki...
Ongoing scandals of prisoner abuse by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are fuelled by the Bush administration’s criticism of the Geneva Conventions. The administration has perpetuated the myth, which domestic public opinion and the popular media have acce...
The anti-war movement may finally find some concurrence inside part of the Bush administration. On March 28, columnist Robert Novak, who has a long history of credible reporting and strong contacts in the Bush administration, reported in The Chicago Sun-Ti...
Back in the 60′s we were all about life, we were pro-life. We tried to hold a festival of life in Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, we talked endlessly aout the life force and our drugs were life drugs as opposed to the death downer drugs consum...
The real story is being eclipsed by the big story, which really ought to be a non-story, or at least one less in my face day after day. A husband wants to remove his wife, who is in a vegetative state and no longer a person in the conventional sense of the word, f...
The New York Times was almost apoplectic Sunday over a human rights "report card" issued by China’s Foreign Affairs Department on the United States. That report, a response to the annual report on China’s human rights situation issued ...