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The New Print Edition of CounterPunch, Only for Our Newsletter Subscribers! How Cops Extort Confessions;
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The New Print Edition of CounterPunch, Only for Our Newsletter Subscribers!
How Cops Extort Confessions;
How the U.S. “Justice System” Really WorksNinety-two per cent of felony convictions in the U.S. are obtained by plea bargains or confessions. Without them the “justice system” would grind to a halt. In an important piece in our latest newsletter, available only to subscribers, Emily Horowitz shows how totally innocent people will “confess” under police pressure, even without physical torture. Horowitz outlines the powerful case for banning confessions altogether. Also in this new edition Marcus Rediker, co-author of the legendary The Many Headed Hydra, writes of popular heroism and resistance in the favelas of Medellin, Colombia. Alexander Cockburn reports on how America’s oldest bank, patronized by the global elites, washed billions smuggled out of Russia, and how the Russians might win their money back, shaking the world’s banking system if they do so. Serge Halimi describes the real battle for the soul of Europe. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! CounterPunch books and gear make great presents.
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Today's Stories August 4, 2008 Uri Avnery August 2 / 3, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Patrick Cockburn Winslow T. Wheeler James Abourezk Andy Worthington Brian Cloughley Robert Fantina Benjamin Dangl Marlene Martin David Yearsley Fatemeh Keshavarz David Michael Green Obama as Dukakis Harvey Wasserman Jason Hribal Phyllis Pollack Laray Polk Ron Jacobs David Macaray David Rosen Dan Bacher Joe Allen Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend August 1, 2008 Jonathan Cook Nikolas Kozloff Rannie Amiri Peter Morici Christopher Brauchli M. K. Bhadrakumar Patrick Cockburn James J. Brittain Dan Bacher Website of the Day
July 31, 2008 Michael Hudson Carl Finamore Mike Whitney Joshua Frank Andy Worthington Ralph Nader Bill Moyers / Robert Weissman Dave Lindorff Website of the Day July 30, 2008 Brian M. Downing Chuck Spinney William S. Lind David Ker Thomson Karl Grossman Mike Whitney Martha Rosenberg James Murren Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Website of the Day July 29, 2008 Jeffrey St. Clair John Ross Peter Morici Alison Weir Gary Leupp David Macaray Brenda Norrell Marjorie Cohn Eric Ruder Website of the Day July 28, 2008 Dr. Bryant Welch Kathy Kelly Mike Whitney Peter Morici Christopher Brauchli Clifton Ross Stephen Lendman Website of the Day July 26 / 27, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair James G. Abourezk Joseph Nevins Uri Avnery Linn Washington, Jr. David Yearsley Binoy Kampmark Saul Landau Joshua Frank Brendan Cooney Jonathan Cook Robert Fantina Lee Sustar Michael Winship David Macaray Missy Beattie Robert Weissman Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend July 25, 2008 Harvey Wasserman Paul Craig Roberts Alan Farago Paul D'Amato Gary Leupp Niranjan Ramakrishnan Mike Whitney Paul Krassner Mike Roselle Website of the Day July 24, 2008 Greg Moses Andy Worthington James Bovard Joe Bageant George Wuerthner DC Larson William Willers David Macaray Website of the Day July 23, 2008 Winslow T. Wheeler Paul Craig Roberts Ralph Nader Mike Whitney Susie Day Website of the Day July 22, 2008 Nikolas Kozloff Patrick Cockburn Soldz, Olson, Reisner Arrigo and Welch Moshe Adler Martha Rosenberg Dan Bacher Harvey Wasserman Anthony Papa Binoy Kampmark Website of the Day July 21, 2008 Ishmael Reed Mike Whitney Andy Worthington Scott Pellegrino John Ross Robert Weitzel Mike Stark Website of the Day July 19 / 20, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Dave Lindorff Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Uri Avnery Neve Gordon Roane Carey Robert Fantina Christopher Brauchli Fred Gardner David Macaray Richard L. Hutto Bill Moyers / Ronnie Cummins David Yearsley Alison McKenna Wajahat Ali Poets' Basement Website of the Day July 18, 2008 Corey D. B. Walker Mike Whitney Robert Bryce Mike Roselle Bouthaina Shaaban Eve Spangler Website of the Day
July 17, 2008 Paul Craig Roberts James G. Abourezk Ralph Nader Allan J. Lichtman Andy Worthington"Screwed Up" and"Abused": Omar Khadr's Interrogations at Gitmo Ronnie Cummins
July 16, 2008 Jeffrey St. Clair Paul Craig Roberts Conn Hallinan Dave Lindorff William S. Lind Christopher Brauchli Website of the Day
July 15, 2008 Michael Hudson Brian Cloughley Patrick Cockburn John Ross Howard Lisnoff Website of the Day July 14, 2008 Uri Avnery Paul Craig Roberts Trish Schuh Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Alan Farago Seth Sandronsky Phyllis Pollack Website of the Day July 12 / 13, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair James Abourezk Nicole Colson Stan Cox Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Wajahat Ali / John Stauber Alan Farago Missy Beattie Robert Fantina Rannie Amiri Gregory Kafoury Fran Shor Martha Rosenberg David Macaray Andrew Wimmer Ron Jacobs Farzana Versey Kim Nicolini Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend July 11, 2008 Kevin Alexander Gray Sasan Fayazmanesh Peter Morici Mike Whitney Manuel Garcia, Jr. Robert Weissman Ramzy Baroud Kelly Overton Adrian Burgos Website of the Day July 10, 2008 Brian McKenna Paul Craig Roberts Saul Landau Ron Jacobs Joshua Frank Peter Morici Alan Maass Robert Weissman William Blum Alan Farago Website of the Day July 9, 2008 Ismael Hossein-Zadeh Luis Rodriguez Sheldon Richman Fatemeh Keshavarz Chad Hanson Sen. Russ Feingold Niranjan Ramakrishnan Dave Lindorff Stanley Heller Philip Rizk Website of the Day July 8, 2008 Nikolas Kozloff Laura Carlsen Mike Whitney Andy Worthington Patrick Irelan Chellis Glendinning David Macaray Dave Lindorff John Chuckman Phillip Doe Website of the Day July 7, 2008 Patrick Bond Kathy Kelly Andy Worthington Clifton Ross Elizabeth Schulte Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Binoy Kampmark Stephen Fleischman Website of the Day July 5 / 6, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair / Patrick Cockburn Mike Whitney Robert Fantina Binoy Kampmark Rannie Amiri Eric Ruder Brian Cloughley William Blum Frank Barat Christopher Brauchli David Yearsley Ron Jacobs Karim Makdisi Wendy Thompson / N. D. Jayaprakash Ramzy Baroud Kelly Overton Richard Neville Poets' Basement Website of the Weekend
July 4, 2008 Kathy Kelly Dave Lindorff Paul Krassner Jackie Corr Laray Polk Dan Bacher Walter Brasch Charles Modiano Website of the Day July 3, 2008 Sharon Smith Andy Worthington Laura Carlsen Peter Morici Ramzi Kysia Martha Rosenberg Anne Landman Dave Zirin Kristin Bricker Website of the Day
July 2, 2008 Patrick Irelan Vijay Prashad Brian Cloughley Ralph Nader Robert Fantina Dave Lindorff Parvez Ahmed Robert Bryce Website of the Day July 1, 2008 Alexander Cockburn Mike Whitney Douglas Macgregor Steven Higgs Andy Worthington Binoy Kampmark Dave Lindorff Roger Burbach Richard W. Behan Gary Leupp Website of the Day |
August 4, 2008 Hollow TimeOlmert's ExitBy
URI AVNERY We were protesting the death of Ahmad Moussa, aged 10, who was murdered during a demonstration against the Separation Fence at Na'ilin village - the fence that robs the village of most of its land in order to give it to the nearby settlement. A soldier aimed and shot the child with live ammunition at close range. The protesters stood under the windows of the Minister of Defense's apartment in the luxurious Akirov Towers in Tel-Aviv and shouted: "Ehud Barak, Minister of Defense / How many children have you murdered so far?" A short while later, Olmert spoke about his strenuous efforts to achieve peace, and promised to continue them until his last day in office. The two events - the demonstration and the speech - are bound together. Together they provide an accurate picture of the era: peace speeches in the air and atrocities on the ground. * * * I AM not about to join the choir of retrospective heroes, who are now falling upon Olmert's political corpse and tearing it to pieces. Not an attractive sight. I have seen this happen several times in my life, and every time it disgusts me. This phenomenon is not particular to Israel. It can be found in the history and literature of many times and places: "The Rise and Fall of…" It's an old story. People grovel in the dust at the feet of their hero. The ambitious and avaricious prance around him. Court-poets and court-jesters sing his praises, and their modern successors - the media people - extol his virtues. And then, one day, he falls from his pedestal and they trample all over him without mercy and without shame. This is the mob that idolized Moshe Dayan after the Six-day War, and then smashed his statue into pieces after the Yom-Kippur war. The mob that kicked David Ben-Gurion viciously after years of boundless flattery. That toppled Golda Meir after following her blindly. I certainly struggled against all three of them when they were at the height of their power, but the rush of the political mob to trample upon their bodies after they had fallen was simply loathsome. Now this is happening again. I have never been captivated by the charms of Ehud Olmert. I have followed his career from the moment he appeared on the stage to the moment he announced his resignation. I saw nothing to arouse my admiration. But now, when I see and hear the outpouring of abuse upon him by those who exalted him to high heavens only yesterday, I feel like averting my eyes. The right to criticize him is reserved for those who have struggled against him over the years. * * * HE IS a total politician, and nothing else. Not a statesman. Not a leader. Not a man with a vision. Only a political technician. Intelligent. A very smooth speaker. I friend among friends. A politician for whom power is the aim, not a means to achieve an aim. The first time I came across him was almost 40 years ago. He was then an assistant of Shmuel Tamir, in the most concrete sense: he assisted him in carrying his bags. Before this, something had happened that was to characterize the whole career of this ambitious man. Tamir, then a young Knesset member for the Herut party (today's Likud), thought he had an opportunity to topple Menachem Begin and take over the party. He tried to push him out during the party convention, and for a moment it seemed that he would succeed. Begin, then 53, seemed totally worn-out after suffering six consecutive election defeats. Olmert, then 21, jumped onto the rebels' bandwagon and made a passionate speech against the legendary leader. But his calculations were faulty. Begin sprang into action and delivered a death blow to the conspirators. They were thrown out of the party in disgrace. Olmert remained with the tiny faction around Tamir, which presented itself as a moderate party, attuned to the peace-seeking mood of the country at the time, mocking the nationalistic stance of Herut ("Both sides of the Jordan belong to us"). But then the Six-day War changed the public mood completely, the weathercock turned and Tamir coined the popular slogan "Liberated Territory shall not be Returned!" Without batting an eyelid, Olmert the moderate turned into Olmert the extremist. But in that small faction there were too many chiefs and not enough Injuns. The road to advancement was blocked. Before long, Olmert engineered a split in order to become the No. 2 in an even smaller faction. He later split that one too and pushed out its veteran leader, Eliezer Shostak. The proceedings bordered on farce: Olmert ran off with the faction's rubber stamp. After the 1973 elections, Olmert return to the Likud at long last and became candidate No. 24 on the party's election list. Before that he had not been idle: he finished law school and flourished financially, using his connections in the Knesset and the corridors of power for his clients' benefit. That's when he perfected the method of exploiting the connections between power and money, a method that he practiced ever since and that eventually caused his downfall. In the Knesset, the young member was looking for a way to attract attention. At the time, the media invented "organized crime", long before it came into being. (A wag jested: "In Israel, nothing is organized. So how come crime is suddenly organized?") Olmert smelled a horse he could ride on. He made rousing speeches, waved papers in the style of Joe McCarthy, presented himself as a valiant fighter against the criminals and reaped a lot of publicity. It was an empty performance: even the police chiefs confirmed that it did not contribute anything to the struggle against crime. But it was a good example of what later came to be known as "spin". * * * IN 1977, Menachem Begin came to power. But he had not the least intention of promoting the man who, 11 years earlier, had tried to stick a knife in his back. Among his other strengths, Begin had a good memory. When Olmert saw that his career in the Knesset was going nowhere, he decided in 1993 to make an Olympic jump: he declared his candidacy for the office of Mayor of Jerusalem. Mayor Teddy Kollek was popular, but old and tired. Olmert won. Today there is general agreement about his tenure: he was a bad mayor. The city deteriorated, poverty increased, young people left for other places and the Arab neighborhoods were criminally neglected. In 1996, he pushed Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu into opening a tunnel leading from the Western Wall to the Muslim quarter, causing a conflagration that killed 17 Israeli soldiers and almost 100 Palestinians. He never expressed any remorse. He also pushed for the creation of the Har Homa settlement between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, which has caused unending friction with the Palestinian community. All the recent attacks in Jerusalem were carried out by youngsters who grew up in the Arab neighborhoods adjacent to Har Homa. Olmert presented himself as the Judaizer of Jerusalem and as a fearless national fighter. But when he ran for Likud chairman in 1999, he was easily beaten by Ariel Sharon. He got only the 32nd place on the Likud election list (out of 38 who won Knesset seats). His rational reaction was to get on Sharon's wagon and push him into leaving the Likud and creating a new party, Kadima. That was a successful bet, testifying to his sharp political senses. Under Sharon he became the de facto No. 2 of the new party and Sharon's official "Deputy Prime Minister" (as a consolation prize, after Sharon could not give him the Treasury but only the far less important Ministry of Industry and Trade). At the time it looked like an empty title, but when Sharon suffered a stroke, Olmert adroitly took over his job. The long and meandering road had finally led to the summit. * * * SHARON'S SUCCESSOR was his opposite in almost every respect. Sharon was a rather maladroit politician and a poor speaker, but a determined leader with a clear political vision. He had an aim and strove towards it consistently. Olmert is a politician, soul and body, a complete opportunist and a smooth speaker, but lacks charisma and has no vision. He is satisfied with the routine mantra of a democratic, Jewish state. After coming to power through the accident of Sharon's stroke, he tried at first to look as if he was following the same path. Sharon wanted to turn Israel into a strong, compact state by annexing the settlement blocs and leaving the Arab enclaves to a weak "Palestinian state". For this purpose he carried out the Gaza "separation". Olmert promised to do the same in the West Bank, but gave up the idea almost immediately. Throughout his term of office he invented grandiose schemes at a dizzying rate, with each of them doing little more than providing fuel to his spin-machine. His incompetence as a leader and commander soon revealed itself. Lebanon War II was a disastrous scandal. The media, which had applauded enthusiastically at the beginning of the war, attacked him after the event for its "faulty execution", but ignored the main failure: the very decision to go to war without a clear and realistic aim and without a political and military strategy. His incompetence as statesman and strategist was equaled by his competence as politician and survival artist. The fact that he held on for an additional two years after such a monumental failure testifies to his political acumen, but also to the degeneration of the Israeli political system. After the war he was desperately in need of a new horse to ride. He chose the "political process" - negotiations with the Palestinians, and later on also with the Syrians. This choice is significant: his sensitive political nose smelled that this is now the really popular thing: not Greater Israel, not the settlements, but peace negotiations and "two states for two peoples" - the more so as this was already popular with the US and Europe. This week, Arab leaders complained that now "the political process will begin again from Square One." That is a complete misunderstanding: the "process" has never left Square One. It was wholly without content, wholly "spin". The "process" has become a substitute for peace, the idea of a "shelf agreement" a substitute for a real peace agreement. There was never any possibility that Olmert would dare to provoke the settlers. The final summing-up of the Olmert era: not the smallest real step toward peace has been taken. The historic peace initiative of the Arab League has been buried. The secular, peace-seeking Palestinian leadership has been almost destroyed, paving the way for the Hamas takeover in the Gaza strip, and perhaps also in the West Bank. Not one single hut in a settlement was dismantled, and the settlements have been enlarged everywhere. In one respect, Olmert resembled Sharon: they both loved money almost as much as power (as do Netanyahu and Barak). They both cultivated close relations with billionaires. They both trailed behind them a cloud of corruption wherever they went. This did not hurt Sharon. He radiated leadership, and the scandals did not really harm him. He was robust enough to carry them on his back. Olmert, being much more fragile, was crushed by them. In the end, he has fallen: not because of the criminal war, not because of his lack of seriousness in pursuing peace, not because of the appointment of a Minister of Justice whose aim is to destroy the judicial system, but because of cash in envelopes and free trips abroad. * * * WHEN FUTURE historians look for a way to characterize this chapter in the annals of the state, one word will readily present itself, the one the writer David Grossman applied in a similar context: hollow. It was a hollow era. A hole in time. A meaningless period, devoid of content (though not for those who paid the price with their lives, destruction and ruins.) And that is also the suitable title for Olmert himself. A hollow politician, devoid of vision. Anyone researching the headlines of these two years will find a lot of drama there. A lot of initiatives. A lot of slogans. A lot of spin. A lot of hot air. And the sum of all this: nothing. A hollow leader of a hollow party pursuing hollow policies in a hollow political system. Uri Avnery is an Israeli writer and peace activist with Gush Shalom. He is a contributor to CounterPunch's book The Politics of Anti-Semitism.
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