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June 25, 2002
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
June 24, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Talkin'
About the F--Word
David Bates
Portland
Gets Dicked:
Cheney Does Oregon
Jo Freeman
Will
the War on Terror Follow the Path of the Cold War?
Tom Gorman
The Only
Thing "Generous" is the Propaganda
Bezhad Yaghmaian
Caught
Between Borders
in a Borderless World
Ben Sonnenberg
Ted
Hughes' Spell
June 22/23, 2002
Douglas Valentine
Sex,
Drugs & the CIA
June 21, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil
Over England:
The Gaucho's Wild Ride
John Borowski
Stossel
and Disney's Crimes Against Nature
Chris Floyd
Southern
Cross: The US Takes Aim at Brazil
David Martin
Of Lies
and Oil: an interview with Rahul Mahajan
James T. Phillips
Serbian
Reservations:
Kosovo 2002
June 20, 2002
Chris Kromm
The South
at War: a Tour of the US Military/Industrial Complex
Jacob Levich
The War
on Terror is
Not a Suicide Pact
Mark Weisbrot
What
are They Doing to Argentina?
Jeffrey St. Clair
and Alexander Cockburn
Fire
Walk With Me:
Terry Lynn Barton and the Flames of Colorado
June 19, 2002
Gary Leupp
Red Targets in Terror War
Lenni Brenner
The Road
Forward for the
Palestinian Movement
Bernard Weiner
Inside
Cheney's Diary:
Cakewalking Through Minefields
Alexander Cockburn
The
Incredible Shrinking President
June 18, 2002
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti--Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker--Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9--11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli--Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
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TO
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Published March 15, 2002
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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June 25,
2002
Reform Now!
by Uri Avnery
To: the President.
From: the National Security Advisor.
Top Secret.
I hereby submit to you, Mr. President,
the report of the secret task force for reforming Israel, parallel
to the task force working on the reform of the Palestinian Authority.
The faults of the Israeli system are
known to all: an autocratic one-man rule by a leader surrounded
by cronies and yes-men, a leader who is a chronic liar whose
every word is untrustworthy, corruption that penetrates every
echelon of government, democratic institutions which serve only
as window-dressing, the lack of a constitution, the absence
of a real opposition, a multi-party system that is just a pretense,
media that are fully mobilized in the service of the government.
This system is unable to move towards
peace. Since you, Mr. President, have determined that peace
is in the basic national interest of the United States, we must
use our power in order to bring about a thorough reform.
Following are some of the findings of
the task force:
One-man rule: In theory, Israel is governed
by a democratic leadership with decentralized authorities and
a system of checks and balances. In fact, the situation is quite
different.
By a sophisticated labyrinth of make-belief
institutions ? government, cabinet, inner cabinet, "kitchen"
"kitchenette" ? a situation has been created that
allows Mr. Sharon to decide and execute anything he wants.
In practice, Mr. Sharon acts through
a small group of family members and cronies who have been devoted
to him for decades, but who have never been elected. (Conspicuous
among them is his son Omri and Messrs. Weisglas and Genger.)
Members of the official cabinet have no influence whatsoever.
Messrs. Peres and Ben-Eliezer, for example, serve only as rubber-stamps.
Corruption: The existing Israeli system
is based on general, systematic and institutionalized corruption.
Large chunks of the national budget are
transferred ? both openly and secretly ? as bribes to religious
and other parties who keep him in power, and parts of these
go into the pockets of their functionaries. These huge sums
are stolen from the general public at a time of growing unemployment
and lack of funds for the infrastructure, when there is even
no money to assure a decent living to invalids, the elderly,
the unemployed and to handicapped children, decent hospitalization
for the sick, not to mention decent living conditions for prisoners,
who are kept in barbarous conditions.
Election campaigns are tainted by general
corruption. Leading candidates receive secretly and illegally
huge amounts of money from local and foreign interest groups,
which expect, of course, to be repaid many times over once
their candidate comes to power. Every campaign is followed by
a long train of criminal indictments, which are but the tip
of the iceberg.
The Prime Minister himself, who is the
owner of the biggest private farm in Israel, is involved in
directing agricultural policy, including the price of water
and the regulation of agricultural imports,
Much as in the Palestinian Authority,
almost all the leading positions in the government and private
services and corporations are handed out to cronies of the Prime
Minister and members of the central committee (numbering thousands)
of the governing party, most of them without elementary qualifications
and talent. All the previous governments did the same. Every
ministry is, of course, staffed and stuffed with cronies of
the minister, and so are local authorities etc. In this way,
a huge parasitical apparatus has been created at the expense
of ordinary taxpayers.
In addition, taxpayers have to carry
the burden of a large sector of people called "Haredim"
(God-fearing) who do not work or pay taxes (nor do they serve
in the army, thereby increasing the compulsory service and reserve
duties of all the others.) Many settlers are also flourishing
at the expense of the general public.
The gap between rich and poor in Israel
is bigger than in any Western country, a fact that turns Israel
into a Third World country.
Mendacity: Mr. Sharon is a certified
liar. Already at the beginning of Mr. Sharon's career, the then
Prime Minister, Mr. Ben-Gurion, defined him as a habitual liar.
On January 29, 1960, Mr. Ben-Gurion wrote about him in his diary:
"If he would wean himself from the habit of not speaking
the truth...he would be an exemplary military leader."
Two years earlier, when Mr. Sharon was promoted to the rank
of Colonel, Mr. Ben-Gurion asked him: "Have you stopped
saying the untruth?"
The mendacity is not a personal trait
of Mr. Sharon only, but a method deeply imbedded in the Israeli
leadership. A predecessor of Mr. Sharon, former Prime Minister
Shamir, has publicly declared that lying for the state is a
virtue.
One could cite innumerable instances
of this official trait. Mr. Sharon's immediate predecessor,
Mr. Barak, for example, has spread a mendacious account of the
Camp Davis summit conference (Summer 2000), in order to put
the blame for the failure on Mr. Arafat. Since then, all the
Israeli media repeat this legend daily, in spite of the fact
that most leading commentators know the truth.
The same goes for the Oslo agreements.
The Israeli leadership, with the help of the media, hides the
fact that most of the violations have come from the Israeli
side (they did not implement the third troops' deployment, did
not open the four agreed "safe passages" between Gaza
and the West Bank, they have embezzled the tax and customs money
collected for the Palestinian Authority, refused to negotiate
in good faith about Jerusalem, settlements and refugees, as
stipulated in the agreements, etc.)
It will be remembered that even Mr. Rabin
announced that "there are no sacred dates", thereby
relieving himself of the duty to fulfil any obligation at the
agreed time.
It should be mentioned that at the time
when the Israeli government has pretended to stop settlement
activity, this activity is in fact continuing at a frantic pace,
as discovered by our satellites.
This, Mr. President, is a summary of
the report. The task force proposes suspending our economic
and military aid to Israel until a thorough reform has been
undertaken, and to appoint a team of monitors to oversee the
results. Israel, like the Palestinians, should also be forced
to adopt a Constitution.
Yours respectfully,
The Advisor.
Today's
Features
Walt Brasch
Bush:
the Compassionate Exerciser
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