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Amazing Plan Surfaces: "We Need Ethno-Weapons!"

David Price tells how top-flight US anthropologists eagerly obeyed US government's mandate to "think in a-moral terms". One scheme of OSS's willing executioners: target Japanese physical "weak spot", the respiratory tract, with anthrax germs. Gabriel Kolko asks What's so New About the Neo-Cons? If they had not existed, would the policies have been the same? Jeffrey St Clair digs up more dirt on Halliburton's secret history. Alexander Cockburn on why we need more "celebrity justice". Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Today's Stories

July 9 / 10, 2005

Sheldon Rampton
Rhetoric vs. Reality in London

July 8, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Blowback Hits Britain: Londoners Pay Heavy Price for Blair's Deception

Tariq Ali
The London Bombings: Why They Happened

Monica Benderman
One Soldier's Fight to Legalize Morality

Rick Jahnkow
Beyond Opt-Out: the Counter-Recruitment Movement

Christopher Brauchli
Dear Vet: If You Want to Eat While You Recuperate, You Gotta Pay Extra

Kim Peterson
Bombs in the Underground: Terror Begats Terror

Joshua Frank
Leakers and Liars: Inching Toward Indictments?

Norman Solomon
Messages from the Carnage

Website of the Day
An Interview with Ray McGovern

 

July 7, 2005

Cockburn / St. Clair
Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr

John Walsh
More Hawkish Than Bush: Dems in Full Battle Cry

Mike Marqusee
Message from London

Gilad Atzmon
London's Burning

Nicole Colson
Showdown at the Supreme Court

Jack Random
Judith Miller, Anti-Hero

Norman Solomon
Judith Miller, Drum Majorette for War

Len Colodny
Is Bob Woodward Still Protecting Al Haig?

Cockburn / St. Clair
Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr

 

July 6, 2005

Elaine Cassel
Political Necrophilia in Florida: Jeb Bush and Terri Schiavo, a Strange Affair

Sean Donahue
Why the G8 Debt Relief Plan Won't Help Nicaragua's Poor

Jeremy R. Hammond
State Sponsors of Terrorism, Applying the US Standard

Joshua Frank
Will Rove be Indicted?

Ali Khan
The "Gift" of US Democratization

Michael Dickinson
Billy Graham's Final Crusade: Blessed are the Warmakers

Norman Solomon
How to Plunge Deeper into a Quagmire: Withdrawal and US Credibility

Dave Zirin
Triumph of the Shrill: Tony Blair's Olympiad

Gary Leupp
Accusing Ahmadinejad

Website of the Day
Humiliation in Baghdad: "Not Something We Would Do"

 

 

July 5, 2005

Behrooz Ghamari
What's the Matter with Iran?: How the Reformists Lost the Presidency

Elaine Cassel
Why This Progressive Will Miss Sandra Day O'Connor

Ron Jacobs
Robert and Mabel Williams's Great Fight for Justice

Bob Libal
The Right's Assault on Academia

Dr. Peter Rost
Mea Culpa from a Big Pharma CEO

Mark Engler
The Big Debt Deal: Where's the Jubilee?

Gideon Levy
They Broke the Public's Heart

Dave Zirin
The Great Olympics Scam

Sameer Dossani
The Trouble with Gleneagles

 

July 2 / 4, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
"Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi?

Lenni Brenner
Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July

Laura Carlsen
Zapatista's Red Alert

James Petras
The Pretensions of Neoliberalism: Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment

William A. Cook
Kings of Serpents

Brian Cloughley
Quagmire of the Vanities

Saul Landau
The Mass Media, Symbols and Ownership

Tom Crumpacker
Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles?

Greg Moses
Dylan's America

Dr. Susan Block
My Adelphia Story: a Tale of Censorship, Fraud, Christian Family Values and Really Lousy Cable Service

Fran Shor
Disassembling Bush's Iraq War: Liberated into a No Man's Land

Fred Gardner
Study: Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer

Moshe Adler
The New London Case: Corporate Giveaways That Destroy Communities, But Don't Create Jobs

David Model
The Downing Street Memo: So What's New?

Seth Sandronsky
California Spying, Schwarzenegger-Style

Ramzy Baroud
Managed Democracy in the Middle East

Suzan Mazur
Frank Carlucci the First: the "Sublime Prince" of Scranton

Ben Tripp
Voltaire, I Can Dig Your Rap

Justin Taylor
Faux Biography and the Pleasures of "Lint"

Brendan Bailey
Mesh Caps, Vice Magazine and the Trouble with Irony

Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel and Louise

Website of the Weekend
Radical Reference

 

July 1, 2005

Christopher Brauchli
With Friends Like These: Bush Buddies Karimov and Musharraf

Pat Williams
What Real Westerners Think About Bush's Pseudo-Cowboy Palaver

Gary Leupp
Summer Surprise?

John Stauber
Mad Cow in America: the USDA Continues to Lie

John Chuckman
The Blessings of Canada

Justicia y Paz
Colombia's Disappeared: Their Names, At Least!

Cockburn / St. Clair
It's Put Up or Shut Up for Bush and the Dems on the Supreme Court

 

June 30, 2005

Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to Carl Levin: Compassion for Iraqis

John Stauber
Oprah Not the "Only" Mad Cow in America

Virginia Rodino
All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Unity in the Anti-War Movement

Jason Leopold
Meet the New Chair of the FERC: James Kelliher, the Man Who Invited Enron to Write Bush's Energy Policy

Dave Lindorff
What Was Bush Thinking?

Greg Moses
Racism at Cape Cod

Norman Solomon
Memo to the Iraq War

Joshua Frank
Israel's Theocrats

Alexander Cockburn
The Political Function of PBS

 

June 29, 2005

Mike Schaefer
How the Washington Post Lied About Its Own War Poll

Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor
Bush's Big Democratic Hoax in Iraq

Sharon Smith
Democrats Shift into Reverse

Sam Husseini
A Quick Way to End the Insurgency

John Stauber
Put a Photo of Mad Cow #2 on a Milk Carton

Ahmad Faruqui
Is Militarism Irreversible in Pakistan?

Linda S. Heard
Bush's Speech: the View from Cairo

Stew Albert
Chet Helms: a Rock and Roll Hero

Ray McGovern
Bush at Ft. Bragg: Stay the Crooked Course

 

 

June 28, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
A Defeat Bred in Deceit

Landau / Hassen
Bush's Meddling in Internal Syrian Politics

John A. Murphy
Keeping Nader Off the Ballot: an Analysis of Political Profiling in Pennsylvania

Mike Whitney
More Lies from Rumsfeld: Those "Meetings" with Insurgents

CounterPunch News Service
JFK on Staying in Vietnam: Is Bush Reading from Kennedy's Playbook?

Dave Zirin
Pining for the Pistons

Dave Lindorff
Showtime in Washington

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: a Bloody Mess

 

 

June 27, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Blood Sacrifices for Empty Slogans

Mike Marqusee
G8: Who are the Hijackers?

Mark Scaramella
When a Corporate Raider Claims Economic Hardship: the Court-Approved Lies of Charles Hurwitz

Leigh Saavedra
Press Apologists for Torture

Kathy Kelly
Where is the UN?


June 25 / 26, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals

Jennifer Van Bergen
America's Parallel Legal Systems

George Corsetti
This Land is Their Land: Condemnation for Corporations

Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer
Let's Open the Gulag: a People's Mission to Gitmo

Kevin Zeese
Counter-Recruitment: How to Keep the Military From Getting their Hands on Your Kids

P. Sainath
Russian Roulette in Vidharbha

John Stauber
How to Bury a Mad Cow

Scott Handleman
Gay in the Third World

Tom Barry
The Politics & Ideologies of the Anti-Immigrationists

John Walsh
Looking for Peace in All the Wrong Places

Justin E.H. Smith
The Hairless Apes of Kansas vs. the Reality-Based Community: Why Progressives Have a Stake in the War on Evolution

Alan Wallis
The Story of Pinky: the Drug Trade in My Neighborhood

Ben Tripp
Negative Space: an Artful Lesson

Frederick B. Hudson
Songs to Lose Your Loneliness By: the Raised Voices of Sweet Honey in the Rock

Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Engel, Davies, and Albert

 

 

June 24, 2005

Ray McGovern
The Downing St. Fixation: Fixing to Fix "Fixed"

Jorge Mariscal
"They Only Call Us Americans When They Need Us for War": the Paradox of Mexican Americans in Iraq

Desiree Hellegers
Portland vs. the FBI

Zeynep Toufe
What Do the American People Know and When Did They Know It?

Joshua Frank
Call Him Senator Con Job

David Lindorff
Which Flag Would Jesus Burn?

Michael Neumann
Victory and Recruitment

Website of the Day
Gagging Dr. Dean

June 23, 2005

Christopher Brauchli
Thomas Griffith and Rule 49: He Practiced Law Without a License; Now He's a Federal Appeals Court Judge

Clay Conrad
Killing Off the Jury with Tort Reform

Standard Schaefer
A Retort to Military Neo-Liberalism

P. Sainath
Vidharbha: No rains and 116F, But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks

Mark Engler
CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death

Norman Solomon
Voluntary Amnesia in America

Cockburn / St. Clair
Frank Calzon

Kathy Kelly
Where You Stand Determines What You See

 

June 22, 2005

Kevin Zeese
The Bush Administration's Psy-Ops on the American Public: an Interview with Col. Sam Gardiner

William S. Lind
Afghanistan: the Other War

Arsalan Iftikhar
Patriots Against the PATRIOT Act

Dan Nagengast
Give Populism a Chance: From France to Kansas

David Krieger
To the Graduates: We Live in an Interdependent World

Kathleen & Bill Christison
Tempest in Santa Fe: Confronting Israeli Myth-making

 

 

June 21, 2005

Brian Cloughley
Destroy the Unbelievers!

Mike Whitney
President Disconnect

Dave Lindorff
Who Needs Big Bird, Anyway?

Mark Weisbrot
Bush's Lonely Campaign Against Hugo Chavez

Matthew R. Simmons
The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis

Dave Zirin
The Crass Slipper Fits: Ron Howard's Terrible "Cinderella Man"

Virginia Rodino
The Anti-War Movement and Impeachment

Paul Craig Roberts
A War Waged by Liars and Morons

 

June 20, 2005

Alan Maass
The GM Job Massacre

Tariq Ali
To the Gates of the Gleneagles Hotel!

Mickey Z.
WMDs American-Style: It's 60 Years Since Alamogordo

William Blum
Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends

Gary Leupp
Old News Indeed: In 1999, Bush Craved Chance to Attack Iraq

Jason Leopold
Someone Tell Bush Iraq Wasn't Behind 9/11, Before He Starts Another War

Dave Lindorff
Why the Media Should be Schiavo'd

Alan Maass
The GM Job Massacre

Uri Avnery
Condi and Hamas

Website of the Day
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July 9 / 10, 2005

An Opportunity or Just More Handwringing from the Peace Movement?

Hiroshima's 60th Anniversary and Crunch-time for Nukes in Iran

By BILL CHRISTISON

[The thoughts below are speculative and opinionated, with most supporting evidence omitted for brevity. The purpose is to generate comment, rebuttal, and a wide, even undisciplined, variety of ideas -- with no off-the-wall or weird ideas barred -- on how the world might work toward a solution of the nuclear proliferation problem that afflicts mankind more seriously with each passing year. Bill C.]

Two events involving nuclear weapons may happen more or less simultaneously this summer. Those of us interested in peace ought to use the likely coincidence of these events to catch the attention of all people who, like us, enjoy having our species described, often undeservedly, as sapiens.

One event, the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima, occurs on August 6, 2005. The date commemorates a never-to-be-forgotten act of U.S. terrorism that -- along with the bombing three days later of Nagasaki -- is still glorified by most citizens of this country as having brought victory over Japan in the shortest possible time with the fewest possible casualties. The thinking in the U.S., of course, is largely limited to U.S. casualties. The hundreds of thousands of non-American civilians killed and maimed are easily rationalized and ignored, as self-centered Americans have done on numerous other occasions in their history.

The second event as yet lacks a specific date, but when and if it happens, it will be a series of large-scale military actions intended to destroy the capability of Iran to produce its own nuclear weapons. Chances are that these attacks will occur shortly before or after August 6, and, if they do, the U.S. will either instigate them directly or participate in them by proxy. The "by proxy" possibility arises because Israel may actually order its own air, missile, and naval forces to carry out the deed, with the implicit -- and possibly explicit -- approval of the U.S. Early in 2005, Vice President Richard Cheney said publicly that Israel "might well decide to act first" to destroy Iran's nuclear program. He added that the Israelis would let the rest of the world "worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterward." Cheney certainly did not appear overly concerned about having to "clean up" for Israel. He made these remarks on the Don Imus show on Inauguration Day, obviously as a deliberate threat meant for wide public consumption. It would be risky to assume that the threat was only a threat.

It should be noted that at the same time as we threaten Iran, the U.S. is acting with extreme hypocrisy in planning to design and produce new types of nuclear weapons for its own arsenal, and shows no objection to Israel's continuing efforts to expand its nuclear weapons and delivery capabilities. Other governments and peoples are well aware of this hypocrisy. Furthermore, the Bush administration, privately supported by many Democrats, adamantly refuses to move even an inch toward serious negotiations on reducing its own nuclear capabilities, as called for in the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), which was ratified by the U.S. and entered into force 35 years ago. The U.S. also refuses to encourage Israel to join a Middle East nuclear-free zone that would include both Israel and the Muslim states of the region.

Today the NPT is a dead letter, mainly because the original compromise that induced many nations to support it stipulated that the non-nuclear powers who signed agreed not to pursue nuclear weapons, IF the present owners of nuclear weapons would agree to work seriously toward reducing and finally eliminating their own weapons. It is true that India, Pakistan, and Israel refused from the start to sign the treaty, but most other nations went along. North Korea originally signed, but recently renounced, the treaty. Now, however, the old compromise seems irretrievably broken. Other nations are unlikely to advertise their plans, but will feel under pressure quietly to turn their own thoughts toward developing nuclear weapons. The head-in-sand attitude of many Americans that we are exceptional and can do anything while ignoring others has probably already lost us the battle against a further and unrestrained spread of nuclear weapons.

Assuming no change in U.S. and Israeli nuclear policies, what is likely to happen in Iran? First, without a full conquest and long-term ground occupation of Iran by many hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, Iran will never give up its intention to acquire nuclear weapons. Iran's population is pushing 68,000,000, and Israel's is one-tenth that size, no more than 6,500,000. It is impossible to believe that an Iranian government would willingly accept a permanent status of having no nuclear weapons while Israel has several hundred and is backed by a United States having thousands. Air and naval attacks with conventional weapons may be able to postpone the day when Iran acquires nukes, but they cannot permanently prevent that day from coming. Furthermore, bear in mind that if it takes 125,000-150,000 U.S. troops to occupy Iraq with its 24,000,000 people two years after the initial invasion, it will take two-and-a-half or three times that many troops to occupy Iran. Will Iranian casualties, and U.S. casualties, also be two-and-a-half or three times higher? Even George Bush should fear that such an occupation could not last for six months without a collapse of domestic support for his administration. But given his willingness to use force to dominate other nations (forget the propaganda about democracy -- domination is indeed what he wants), who can say for sure that he will not try to occupy Iran whatever the difficulties?

Beyond occupation is a final, more extreme possibility: an offensive rather than defensive "first use" of nuclear weapons by either the U.S. or Israel not only to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities and kill many Iranians, but also to show Iranians that further resistance is hopeless. Such acts of terrorism -- although the government itself would certainly not use that word ­ are allowable under the Bush administration's current nuclear strategy, just as they were under the 1945 rules. In the case of Iran and whatever Iran has done or not done, to believe that the present U.S. government would actually launch a nuclear attack on that country, or acquiesce in Israel's doing so, seems inconceivable. It is, nevertheless, a possibility that cannot be excluded.

Neither the U.S. peace movement nor peace movements elsewhere seem to have seriously addressed the question of what policy we should pursue toward Iran if the Iranian government does continue moving toward the development of nuclear weapons. It seems quite likely that the newly elected Iranian government will do precisely that. What do we do beyond wringing our hands? And should global peace movements be rethinking in any way the appropriate policies to support in the entire area of nuclear proliferation as we face not only the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also a 35-year old Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty that is going nowhere and a militarily all-powerful United States that has become the greatest nuclear rogue state of all?

Here is one person's first cut at suggestions for new policies on nuclear proliferation for peace activists to consider.

ONE. Establish, by emphasizing and reemphasizing the point, that U.S. policies on nuclear proliferation should always support and be consistent with global justice and an expansion of human rights.

TWO. Oppose all military actions and/or sanctions intended to prevent Iran or any other nation from obtaining nuclear weapons, until the U.S. and all other nuclear nations have eliminated such weapons from their own arsenals, and the elimination has been verified by international inspectors. If this policy allows Iran and certain other nations to acquire nukes, so be it. If justice is one of our goals, any other policy is simply untenable. This policy is also the only way to force the U.S. into serious negotiations to eliminate its own nuclear arsenal. Unless we succeed in bringing about such negotiations by the U.S., there can no longer be any hope for a meaningful nonproliferation policy.

THREE. Use the August 6 anniversary to emphasize the negative, not the positive. E.g., "Sixty years have passed, and while there has yet been no further use of nuclear weapons in warfare, we have made NO progress in inducing possessors of the weapons to negotiate away their arsenals. Furthermore, it has become gradually easier over the years for nations to acquire the weapons, so we need to change SOMETHING in our policies to meet the new situation." Then, and only then, we might start talking about some positive things. We should show more understanding that in almost every case, a nation's or group's desire for nuclear weapons arises from political issues on which the nation or group believes it has been mistreated, justice for its people ignored, or its people's human rights violated. We should be helpful, and be seen to be helpful, in solving the political injustices and changing our policies to stop violating human rights anywhere. Above all, until we in the U.S. peace movement can bring about major changes in U.S. foreign policy, and resolve some of the political grievances against us (including our own massive and growing nuclear arsenal), we should simply stop talking about not wanting other nations to go nuclear. All we accomplish with our carping is to intensify already existing global hatreds against the U.S.

Bill Christison was a senior official of the CIA. He served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA's Office of Regional and Political Analysis. He is a contributor to Imperial Crusades, CounterPunch's new history of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. He can be reached at: christison@counterpunch.org.