Today's Stories

December 3, 2008

Andrew Cockburn
What's Wrong with the U.S. Miliary

December 2, 2008

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Kettle of Hawks

Paul Craig Roberts
The New Arms Race

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
The Mumbai Terror Attacks: Is Pakistan to Blame?

Sarah Anderson /
John Cavanagh
Skewed Priorities: How the Bailout Dwarfs Spending on Other Global Crises

William Blum
The Mythology of the War on Terrorism

John Ross
Mexico's Drug War Goes Down in Flames

Dave Lindorff
A Tale of Two Terror Attacks

Nicola Nasser
A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible

Steve Conn
Operation Redskin Removal

Robert Bryce
Coal Hard Facts

Website of the Day
Country, Funk, Soul

December 1, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
From Baghdad to Mumbai, by Way of Pakistan

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
Obama's Economic Team: Records of Failure

Vijay Prashad
The Fires in South Asia

Deepak Tripathi
Obama's Foreign Crises

Joshua Frank
Madam Secretary Clinton and the Middle East

P. Sainath
The Unlikely Martyrdom of Free Market Jihad

Alan Farago
The Right's War on Regulators

Binoy Kampmark
Sydney's Ball and Chain

Chris Genovali
Silent Fall

David Michael Green
Hope You Die Before You Get Old

Stephen Martin
The Chinese are Coming, the Chinese are Coming!

Website of the Day
Robert Rubin: Coward, Liar or Both?

November 28-30, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
In Time of Trouble

Mike Whitney
The Obama "Dream Team": Rubin Clones and Other Fakers

Ted Honderich
What is the Meaning of Obama's Election?

Tom Kerr
Preserving Filthy Lucre (Or Becoming My Dad)

Mike Ely
The Conquest of New England

David Yearsley
Hymns of the Conquest

Deepak Tripathi
Uproar in Police-State Britain

Sonja Karkar
Gaza's Death Throes

Ramzy Baroud
Salvation in a News Broadcast

Robert Weitzel
Israel's Settlement on Capitol Hill

Robert Roth
Can We Create a Movement for Change?

Carlos Fierro
Obama and the End of Racism?

David Macaray
How to Kill a Union

David Rosen
A New Sexual Agenda

James Cockcroft
Indigenous People Rising

Stan Cox
The Most Disappointing Gift

Steve Conn
Talking Turkey About College Basketball

Stephen Martin
The Electromagnetic Pulse and Economic Warfare

Richard Rhames
Busty Bimbettes, Bombs and Brand Obama

Kim Nicolini
Women as Products and Cannibalistic Achievers

Lorenzo Wolff
A Battle Cry for the Confused and Vulnerable

Poets' Basement
Woods, Harrison and Corseri

November 27, 2008

Tariq Ali
The Assault on Mumbai

Steve Hendricks
Thanksgiving We Can Believe In: Justice in Indian Country

Ralph Nader
Open Up Those Corporate Tax Returns

John Walsh
The Root Cause of the Crisis of 2008

Dave Lindorff
The Department of Homeland Lunacy

Christopher Brauchli
Thanks A Lot, Mr. Meese: How Alberto Gonzales Learned to Get You to Pay for His Legal Bills

Matthew Koehler
Giving Thanks for Burned Forests

Website of the Day
John Trudell: "Crazy Horse We Hear What You Say"

November 26, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Obama Letdown

Alan Farago
Bailouts and the New Math

Stanley Heller
Don't Bail Them Out, Take Them Over

Kevin Zeese
The Real Cost of the Bailout

Steve Conn
Now It Can Be Told (Except in North Carolina)

Ray McGovern
Kafka and Uighurs at Guantánamo

Ron Jacobs
King George is Gone: Now It's Time to Organize

Eric Walberg
Obama's Odious Entourage

Martha Rosenberg
Pay No Attention to That Turkey Being Slaughtered (Or How Sarah Palin Created a Whole New Generation of Vegetarians)

Matt Siegfried
Back to the Future With Barack

Website of the Day
"Every Time I've Compromised, I've Lost"

November 25, 2008

James Abourezk
Of Arrogance, Bailouts and the Big Three

Ralph Nader
Don't Suppress Carter

Patrick Irelan
PBS Reports for Big Oil on Venezuela

John Ross
Obama in Bedlam

Fred Gardner
Dr. Goodwin and the Infinite Con

Dan LaBotz
The Auto Crisis: a Big Caravan to Washington?

Tom Barry
Napolitano and Immigration Policy

Norman Solomon
The Ideology of No Ideology

Richard Morse
Memo From Haiti: Where the Culture of Corruption Meets the Corruption of Culture

Chris Strohm
The Missing Rules of Engagement in Cyberwar

Website of the Day
Green vs. Green?

November 24, 2008

Mike Whitney
You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet

Pam Martens
The Rise and Fall of Citigroup

Laray Polk
Bush's Library: the Kurds, Oil and Missing Records

David Ker Thomson
American Friends: With Friends Like These, Who Needs Canadians?

Uri Avnery
Likud Rising

Joe Mowrey
Deprivation and Desperation in Gaza

Ramzi Kysia
An Administration in Search of a Progressive: the Team Obama Should Have Picked

Kevin Zeese
The Causes of the Auto Crisis

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing the Blob: Idiots and Bailouts

David Macaray
Seven Reasons You Should Join a Union

Howard Lisnoff
Inaugurations Past and Present

Website of the Day
I Hate the Beatles

November 21 / 23, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Honeymoon is Looking a Bit Wan

Michael Hudson
Paulson's Cascade of Lies

Mike Whitney
Time to Move to Plan B ... If There is One

Barbara Rose Johnston /
Holly M. Barker
Cautionary Tales From a Nuclear War Zone

Serge Halimi
The Gloom of Empire: Downhill All the Way

Alan Farago
The Suburbs March On

Ralph Nader
Changing With Retreads: the Third Clinton Administration

Saul Landau
When Old Axioms Don't Apply

Robert Bryce
From LBJ to Obama: the End of Texas Dominance

Shannon May
Ecological Crisis and Eco-Villages in China

Binoy Kampmark
The End of the Yugo

Jack Ely
The Fate of the West's Wild Horses

Ramzy Baroud
The Rights of Women in War Zones

Missy Beattie
Why Vote, Anyway?

Larry Portis
Women Soldiers Serving in (and Barely Surviving) the Israeli Army

James McEnteer
Colombia's Laboratory of Failure

Christopher Brauchli
A Tale of Two Whales

David Yearsley
Real Swords, Fire and Don Giovanni

Adam Engel
Power Down

Ron Jacobs
The Continuing Saga of the White Album

Lorenzo Wolff
Honky Tonk Heroes: When Country Got Real

Poets' Basement
Raza Ali Hasan

Website of the Weekend
Lips and Fingers

November 20, 2008

P. Sainath
The Jurassic Auto and Idea Park

Brian McKenna
How Dow Chemical Defies Homeland Security and Risks Another 9/11

Paul Craig Roberts
What Uncle Sam Has to Say to His Creditors

Andy Worthington
How Guanántamo Can be Closed

Peter Lee
India Doubles Down in Afghanistan ... Maybe

Dr. Eyad al-Serraj
At the Erez Crossing

Sen. Russ Feingold
The Bush Pardons

Lance Selfa
Who Made the New Deal?

Ray McGovern
Keeping Gates

Benjamin G. Davis
Ending Torture; Prosecuting the Torturers

Tracy McLellan
Obama's Crony Democracy: the Return of Tom Daschle

Website of the Day
Finally, a Victory for Palestinians

November 19, 2008

M. Shahid Alam
Obama and the Politics of Race and Religion in America

Mario A. Murillo
Holder, Chiquita and Colombian Death Squads

Martine Boulard
Escaping the Dollar's Shadow

Robin D. G. Kelley
Will Obama be the First "Freedom" Democrat?

Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi
Obama and the Iron Cage

Jonathan Cook
Who Will Stop the Settlers?

Steve Conn
Spare Change or No Change at All

George Wuerthner
The NYT and the Beetles of Mass Destruction

Michael Winship
This Just in From Middle Earth

Stephen Martin
The Other Side of the Pleasure-Dome

Website of the Day
An Important Holiday Message From Kristen Johnston

November 18, 2008

Chellis Glendinning
Cheering for Morgan Stanley

George C. Wilson
Perils of Pakistan: Will It Prove to be Obama's Cambodia?

Franklin Lamb
Who Will Evict Israel from Lebanon: Hezbollah or the UN?

Bill and Kathleen Christison
The Irresponsibility of Appointing Hillary Clinton Secretary of State

Roger Burbach
Orchestrating a Civic Coup in Bolivia: How Bush Tried to Bring Down Morales

John Ross
Drilling vs. Direct Democracy in Mexico

Wajahat Ali
Is Obama the Muslim World's Superman?

Damien Millet /
Eric Toussaint
What Really Happened in Washington? The G20 and the Inconsistent Script

Marc Gardner
When Mooning is a Sex Crime

Eric Walberg
Courting the Bear: a New Era for Russian/Western Relations?

Wendy Williams
The Bottled Water Con

Website of the Day
Where's Zappa When We Need Him?

November 17, 2008

Michael Hudson
Bankers Shake Down Congress and the G-20

Paul Craig Roberts
When It's a Clear Day and You Can't See GM

Mike Whitney
Busted in Washington

Steve Conn
Where is Nader Country 2008? Mapping the Nader Votes

Andy Worthington
Closing Guantánamo: Advice for Obama

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of Israel's Blockade of Gaza: "They Are All Hamas"

Rannie Amiri
Dual Loyalties Will Doom Obama

David Macaray
Bailing Out the Automakers

David Michael Green
Twelve Victories

Charles Modiano
Sports Illustrated and Sexism: Tokenism or a New Day?

Website of the Day
The South Sea Bubble

November 14 / 16, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Heading for the First Hundred Days

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Bill Clinton Doomed the Spotted Owl: a Cautionary Tale for Greens in the Age of Obama

Mike Whitney
Paulson the Bungler

Sasan Fayazmanesh
RIP: the Experts, 1929-2008

Moshe Adler
Keynes: China's Greatest Export?

Anthony DiMaggio
Transcending Race?

Jean Bricmont
Cats, Dogs and Creationism

Sheldon Rampton
The Eisenstadt Hoax: a Real Life Example of a "Fake Fake"

Douglas Valentine
Let the Trials Begin!

Joseph Nevins /
Timothy Dunn
Barricading the Border

Tom Barry
Rahm Emanuel's Political Pragmatism on Immigration

Ron Jacobs
Che Guevara Meets Trashman: the Genius of Spain Rodriguez

Larry Portis
The State of the Israeli State

Mary Lynn Cramer Obama's Brain Trust: Seems Like Old Times

Sherry Wolf
The Myth of the Black/Gay Divide

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi
Secretary of Greed: How Larry Summers Championed Wall Street by Impoverishing the Mexican People

Jacob Hornberger
The Conservative Malaise: Hey, Brother, Can You Spare Some Habeas Corpus?

Lance Selfa
The Center-Right Nation Con

Benjamin Dangl
Vermont Against General Dynamics

Seth Sandronsky
Lifelines in Hard Times

Russell Mokhiber
Time to Give the Friends of Big Coal the Boot

Allan Stellar
Nuke a Gay Whale for the Navy

Kelly Overton
Get Thee to a Shelter: the Obamas and the Million-Mutt March

Martha Rosenberg
Why Mink are Cheering the Economic Crisis

Richard Rhames
Palling Around with Ray the Plumber

David Yearsley
How I Played Hooky from "High School Musical 3"

Lorenzo Wolff
Zach is Back: Songs of Hurt, Rage and Resistance

Poets' Basement
Gibbons, Ford and Buknatski

Website of the Weekend
The Eyes Have It

November 13, 2008

Pam Martens
The Two Trillion DollarBlack Hole

Vijay Prashad
Guilt by Participation: Sonal Shah's Membership Has Expired

Patrick Cockburn
Who is Paying for the Iraqi National Intelligence Service?

Jonathan Cook
The Withering Palestinian Economy

Ralph Nader
Obama and the Rogue Regime

Bill Quigley
McCain Owes America an Apology

Lee Sustar
Bailing Out the Big Three

Omar Barghouti
Boycotting Israeli Settlement Products

Steve Conn
More Alaska Fun

Howard Lisnoff
The Last Bastion of Hate

Jeff Cohen
What Indy Media Heroes Can Teach Us

Website of the Day
Who are the Obamagelicals?

November 12, 2008

Johanna Berrigan
Scattered Families: the Iraq Refugee Crisis

Steve Conn
The Big Mystery Election in Alaska

Patrick Bond
Against Volcker

Bokar Ture /
Dedrick Muhammad
Remembering a Black Radical in a Barack Obama America

Alan Farago
The Hispanic Vote in South Florida: Not Dyed Blue Yet

Dave Lindorff
Rescuing Joe Lieberman

Karl Grossman
Break Up Big Oil: Tyranny in the Tank

David Macaray
An Obama Litmus Test: Will Labor Have a Seat at the Table?

George Wuerthner
Act Now to Save America's Public Forests

Susie Day
Heavy Weather

Website of the Day
Does the Planet Have a Future? an Interview with Derrick Jensen

December 3, 2008

The Defense Budget as Hamburger Stand

What's Wrong with the U.S. Military

By ANDREW COCKBURN

Coinciding with the arrival of Obama and his deputies in Washington, the Center for Defense Information is releasing “America’s Defense Meltdown -- Pentagon Reform for President Obama and the New Congress,” a primer on what is wrong with our defense system written by men with long and honorable experience in the bowels of the military services and Pentagon bureaucracy. The book’s editor, Winslow Wheeler is familiar to readers of this site for his acrid and knowledgeable  commentaries on the defense establishment. CounterPuncher Andrew Cockburn interviews him  about the book and its message.

You say in your preface that “the vast majority, perhaps even all, of Congress, the general officer corps of the armed forces, top management of American defense manufacturers, prominent members of Washington’s think tank community and nationally recognized ‘defense journalists’  will hate this book.”  Why is that?

WW:  The conventional wisdom amongst the elite in Washington is that they have done a pretty good job of taking care of our national defense, that things may be a little expensive but we have the best armed forces in the world, perhaps even in history, and we do the best for our troops by giving them the world’s most sophisticated equipment which is, of course, the most effective.  We have, so the elite asserts, demonstrated our ability by knocking off Saddam Hussein’s forces twice and are in general a model to the rest of the world on how to build equipment and provide for forces.

That’s all crap. None of it is true.  None of it stands up to scrutiny. Let’s tick through it.  First of all, we now have the largest defense budget in inflation-adjusted dollars since the end of World War Two.  That has bought the smallest military establishment we have had since the end of World War Two.  We now have fewer navy combat ships and submarines, fewer combat aircraft and fewer army fighting units than we have had at any point since the end of World War Two.  Our major items of equipment are on average older than at any time during this period.  Key elements of our fighting forces are badly trained.  In other words we’re getting less for more.  People point to the two wars against Saddam Hussein.  His armed forces were pitifully incompetent and even against them in both the 1991 and 2003 gulf wars we demonstrated serious deficiencies while overestimating how good we were.

But is the U.S. likely to be facing anyone better in the near future?

WW:  Apparently we are right now.  In Afghanistan things are going south, rapidly.  In Iraq people seem to think the surge saved things, but far more important than the so-called surge in reducing American casualties has been the purchase of Sunni co-operation with hefty bribes and the ceasefire  that was brokered not by us but by Iran to get Muqtada al-Sadr’s forces to sit on the sidelines.  Time after time we read in the press about how American air units have killed civilians, how American ground units have killed civilians.  We have a huge technological edge against these opponents and yet they are able not just to survive against us but fight us all too effectively.

What brought the U.S. to this sorry state of affairs?

WW:  The  fundamental reason, I believe, is that we are not interested in what works best in combat.  Instead, our defense structure in Washington is interested in other things.  In Congress they’re interested in jobs and campaign contributions.  In the Pentagon they’re interested in various political and bureaucratic agendas. They’re not paying attention to the lessons of combat history.  A  bloated, declining military structure is the result. 

Surely you’re not suggesting that our leaders in uniform, as opposed to those interfering civilians  [sound of Wheeler laughing]  aren’t interested in producing the most combat-efficient force possible?

WW:  I was laughing because that’s the bilgewater that they keep on pumping – and believing, I’m sure – on Capitol Hill.  If you look at the record, a lot of our military leadership is very questionable.  During the 2003 march to  Baghdad the commanders  had to pause simply out of panic at the minimal opposition they were facing, coupled with some poor weather and a supply problem.  None of the commanders  warned the public, or the president, about the problems that we encountered in Iraq.  People point to [former army chief of staff] General Eric Shinseki as the great hero who told us that we needed a larger invasion and occupation force and was ignored.  That argument simply doesn’t work.  The idea that more  Christian, white American soldiers occupying an alien country would have prevented an insurgency is ridiculous. 

We might also pause to note that Shinseki gave his famous warning just three weeks before the invasion, having remained totally mute for the year of buildup when a public statement might actually have made a difference.  Anyway, criticism of the Pentagon is normally considered liberal turf, but I believe you yourself served as a Republican staffer on the hill for many years and your contributors don’t look like too dovish a crew.  Can you tell us a little more about who put this book together?

WW:  It’s not a bipartisan bunch, it’s a non-partisan bunch.  I myself worked for three Republicans and one Democrat on Capitol Hill.  Two of the Republicans were so-called ‘suspect Republicans’.  One was Jacob Javits, the other was Nancy Kassebaum, neither of whom were ‘good soldiers’ on the Republican dogma of “more money for the Pentagon means we are stronger.”  The people who wrote this anthology come from all over the political spectrum. In most cases I don’t even know what their politics are.  Some of them are registered Republicans.  Most of them are pretty non political people.  Their qualification is the fact that they had brilliant careers, albeit sometimes short ones, in the armed forces or inside the Pentagon, as civilians.  Some of them are writers who have written extensively about defense issues with no identifiable politics.

On the list of contributors I see majors, lieutenant colonels, colonels.  I don’t see any generals.  Why do you think that might be?

WW:  I’ve not met a general in my lifetime that I would welcome to write a chapter in this book.  That doesn’t mean they don’t exist.  I just don’t know of them. In some cases these contributors sacrificed their careers in order to speak truth to power.  These are people who have demonstrated by what they have already written and what they have already done that they understand the nature of the problem in our defenses and that they have real ideas to address those problems. 

Now there will be some among CounterPunch’s readers who  say, “Wheeler and his pals just want to give us a more combat-efficient military so that President Obama can go and bomb and invade and lay waste to more countries.”  What do you say to that? 

WW:  They’re half right.  We do want to give any president an effective, usable military  force.  But we have three chapters in this book that address various aspects of our national character and national security strategy.  The second chapter, written by retired air force colonel Chet Richards is remarkable in the radically different national security strategy it urges Congress and the president to consider.  It is fundamentally a strategy that goes back to America’s roots and says that we should only fight when we truly have to fight rather than pursue agendas and political dogmas and help politicians posture as patriots. 

It’s clear that you feel strongly about the amount of money we’re spending on defense and yet it’s frequently pointed out that calcaulated as a percentage of GDP, we spent more on defense in the 1950s.  Do you think we’re exaggerating the burden of the present defense budget?

WW:  The use of the measure of GDP percentage to decide how much money we should spend on the Pentagon is specious and ridiculous.  The thing that should define how much we spend is the world situation; how much we can afford; how we decide to make good use of our money.  The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, an individual that President-elect Obama seems to be happy with, has said that we should adopt a specific share of GDP –  four per cent, he says – and spend that only on defense.  It would make as much sense if we counted the number of MacDonalds in this country as a measure of the size of our economy and built our defense on the basis of the number of MacDonald’s hamburger stands in this country.  It is a completely irrelevant measure of what our spending should be.

Given the way the economy is going, pretty soon four per cent of GDP isn’t going to get you much of a defense budget.

WW: That’s why they’re now starting to talk about “4.8 percent.”  It’s a cheap trick designed to make the defense budget look small.  Because the Pentagon budget is now bigger than it has been since 1946 they’re looking for devices to make it look small and this ruse of a percentage of GDP is right down their alley. 

Outline what you and your contributors say the Obama national security team should be doing, as opposed to what they seem more than likely to do. 

WW:  The book is divided into chapters that identify specific problems as well as the solutions we identify, but to keep it short and simple, it starts with a national strategy that seems more appropriate for the 21st century and does not get America involved in these quagmire occupations in alien lands and seeks to defend us only when we have real threats that we actually have to face.

What that means is that our army, navy and air force need to go through a radical resizing and reposturing to make themselves appropriate to the world as it currently exists.  It also means that we need to learn how to think in new and different ways in making decisions in the Pentagon.  By that I mean decisions about hardware need to be made on the basis of much more reliable data, in sharp contrast to the phony, biased data that they use to make decisions now. 

We need to have a set of people making those decisions who are not corrupted by the possibility that after they leave the Pentagon they can go work for people who are making or losing money based on their decisions.  That’s the so-called revolving door issue.  People tend to think it’s not a big deal. It’s a huge deal. It corrupts our decisions and it corrupts the people making them. 

Given the sort of people he’s selecting for defense position, it looks as though Obama is not necessarily going to follow the course of action you urge in your book.  What is your opinion of the Obama defense team as currently formulated?

WW:  He campaigned on “Change We Can Believe in”  and his transition almost immediately switched to “Continuity We Can Believe In.”  The people so far selected, especially Robert Gates, have a track record, and that track record is basically to keep things the way they are.  Gates will do what he’s told on issues like Iraq and Afghanistan.  He’s already made it clear that as far as managing the Pentagon is concerned he thinks he’s been doing a competent job.  But during his tenure things have only gotten worse.  The budget’s going up faster than ever before in recent history; the size of our forces is going south; the equipment continues to get older.  We have a new report from the Congressional Budget Office that tracks the size of our weapons inventory and its age.  This study shows that if everything goes perfectly according to Gates’ plans as revealed in his Pentagon budget, our forces will continue to shrink and the equipment will continue to get older.

The one exception is Obama’s plan to expand the number of combat units in the army and marine corps.  That is turning out to be a question of much larger cost than people suspected.  It’s going to cost us somewhere in excess of a hundred billion dollars.  It’s very unclear therefore if that expansion is actually going to occur and the historic trend suggests that even if it does occur it will reverse itself in a few years and the additional units will be phased out.  Also, if you look at previous wars such as Korea and the Indochina wars, the expansions that occurred during those conflict were gigantic compared to the puny little 60,000 man increase that Robert Gates and Barack Obama say they want to endorse. 

Realistically, do you think there’s any possibility that you could meaningful reform in the Pentagon?

WW: I’m not at all optimistic.  The second tier of appointments that they’re talking about in the press for the Obama team are mostly holdovers from the Clinton era, when things were almost as bad as they were during the Bush era.  Most of the major hardware programs that are now coming a cropper as major cost and performance disasters were conceived during the Clinton era.  Things such as the Future Combat Systems, or  the Navy’s DDG 1000 Destroyer known as the Arsenal Ship and later the DDX Destroyer, spawned when Richard Danzig was Secretary of the Navy.  Danzig is under active consideration to be deputy secretary of defense and Gates’ natural successor when Gates finishes whatever short timer term he has under Obama.  The F-22 fighter, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, it goes on, all these programs that are cost and performance disasters had their genesis during the Clinton era.

One of the individuals being talked of now for some unspecified senior position with the Obama team is an individual by the name of William Lynn.  During the Clinton era Lynn was the Comptroller of the Department of Defense. I was a staffer on the Senate Budget Committee and I’ve never seen, before or since, such preposterous gimmicks as those that were added when William Lynn was chief financial officer at the Pentagon as the DoD Comptroller.  If that’s the kind of performance we can expect, we’re in for a rocky time with the Pentagon and its budget.

What about Obama’s National Security Adviser, General Jim Jones?  He looks like a fine upstanding marine.

WW:  He is a man of great stature, physically and figuratively, in Washington.  He is a Washington ‘heavy’ but if you look at his record, nothing much ever happened.  Things went south in Afghanistan pretty rapidly when he was supreme commander of all Nato forces in Afghanistan.   When he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, a lot of the marines’ overpriced underperforming hardware programs, such as the V-22 [vertical takeoff troop transport plane] and the Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle were endorsed and continued happily along.  He seems to have been mostly a placeholder when he had these very senior and important positions.

Interested readers can download America's Defense Meltdown for free from the Center for Defense Information.

Andrew Cockburn is a regular CounterPunch contributor. He lives in Washington DC. His most recent book is  Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont