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March
2, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sweat,
Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
March
1, 2002
Brendan
Sexton III
What's
Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out
Terry
Diggs
Why
Twain's Pudd'nhead
Wilson Still Matters
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
February
28, 2002
James
T. Phillips
Baghdad,
Spring 1992
Gideon
Samet
Sharon
Must Go
Rep. Ron
Paul
Before
We Bomb Iraq
M. Shahid
Alam
Samuel
Huntington:
Peddling Civilizational Wars
St. Clair
/ Cockburn
Rumble
from the Jungle:
Ecaudorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's ChemWar
February
27, 2002
Eric Hobsbawm
The
Future of War and Peace
John Troyer
About
that WTC Memorial
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Wired
for Democracy
or Business?
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
Politicians
Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
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
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Published Oct. 15, 2001
8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
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 New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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
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This Explosive
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Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
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March 2, 2002
Disturbing the Planet and Blaming
the Aftermath on Others
By John
Chuckman
I received a letter from a reader recently asking
me what it is about America that I hated so much. Since its tone
was polite, I replied at length. I don't hate anything - "hate"
is an awfully strong word - but there are things I find disturbing
about America, and, as it happens, these are things many others
also find disturbing.
There's certainly no need for my services
in the 24-hour-a-day orgy of noisy, self-praise that pours from
television, radio, magazines, movies, sporting events, and even
sermons in the home of the brave. This non-stop, drum-beating,
national revival meeting has become the background noise of everyday
American life, so much so that many are not aware that there
is anything unusual about it.
There is a wonderful scene in "The
Gulag Archipelago." After a speech by Stalin, the audience
applauds and applauds and cannot stop applauding. Everyone waits
for his or her neighbors to stop before stopping, only the neighbors
also do not stop. The applause threatens to continue forever.
Why? Because NKVD men prowl the aisles, looking for anyone who
stops applauding.
Without making any outlandish, inappropriate
comparisons between Bush's America and Stalin's Russia, there
is still a very uncomfortable parallel between that frightening
historical scene and recent events in the U.S., especially the
State of the Union address.
Even though the President said nothing
demonstrating statesmanship or imagination or even compassion,
everyone applauded and applauded and kept applauding. Some media
commentators actually compared his feeble recitation of platitudes
with the thrilling cadence and brilliant words of Franklin Roosevelt
at a time of true darkness. Several well-known television news
personalities felt called upon to make odd, jingoistic personal
statements as though they felt the need to prove their patriotic
bona fides.
What a big fat disappointment America
is today. An affluent, noisy, moral netherworld. A place where
fundamentalist pitchmen in blow-dried coifs and Pan-Cake makeup
plead to fill the moral void, but only add to the noise.
A place where jingoism and mediocrity
are lavishly praised. A people bristling with demands about their
rights and redress of grievances, but with no thought about their
responsibilities. A people who brag of being freer than any other
people without knowing anything about other people.
An insatiably-consuming engine of a country
whose national dream has been reduced to consuming more of everything
without a care for anyone else on the planet. A people without
grace who always blame others for what goes wrong.
Americans, roughly 4% of the planet by
numbers, gulp down more than half the world's illegal drugs,
but in all the strident speeches and in all the poorly-conceived
foreign policy measures, it is always the fault of Mexico or
Colombia or Vietnam or Panama or the French Connection or someone
else out there. Anyone, that is, but the people who keep gulping
and snorting the stuff down, and all the shady American officials
who are so clearly necessary to keep the merchandise widely available.
One of history's great moments of insufferable
posturing came with the creation of annual "report cards"
on how well various nations were doing at controlling drugs,
as though these other countries were unreliable children being
assessed by their wise Auntie America, the same wise Auntie zonked
out on a million pounds of chemicals at any given moment.
America has a long history of vote tampering
and rigged elections in many local jurisdictions. It is widely
understood that vote tampering, especially in Chicago, gave John
Kennedy a victory he did not win in the 1960 election. Biographer
Robert Caro has revealed how Lyndon Johnson's political career
in Texas had the way smoothed by vote fraud. And now, two and
a quarter centuries after the great republic's founding, she
still cannot run a clean election for president.
On top of fraud and unwillingness to
spend enough to assure proper ballots, America clings to the
most corrupt method possible to finance election campaigns, defining
private money as free speech. The more of it, the better. One
would almost think that the billions in bribes paid out by the
CIA over the decades to corrupt other governments had influenced
thinking about how things should be done at home.
Yet with a record like this, the State
Department never stops passing public judgement on the inadequacies
of democracy in other places. The State Department's views on
democracy, about as deserving of serious consideration as the
last Congress's idea of why you impeach an elected president,
reduce to the same tacky business as the drug report cards: it's
always someone else who's wrong. Even worse, the sermons on democracy
and rights frequently are used as wedges for trade concessions.
It just doesn't get more hypocritical than that.
Having mentioned the CIA's bribery over
the decades, its interference in the internal affairs of so many
countries, I recall the reaction of American legislators a few
years ago when it was thought possible, though never proved,
that Chinese money had been funneled into an American election.
Heavens, how dare they do an underhanded thing like that! Sully
an American election! The same legislators never considered that
they themselves, in tolerating a corrupt system of election finance,
were responsible for such activity's even being possible.
Consider Mr. Bush's lurid fantasy about
an "axis of evil." One almost wants to ask whether
the choice of words reflects long-term deleterious effects of
the cocaine he reportedly used when he was sowing oats instead
of bombs. The fact is that much of the world's terror is a direct
response to American foreign policy that reflects daydreams and
wishes in Georgia and Iowa rather than actual conditions abroad.
The CIA's three billion-dollar fraternity
prank with other people's lives during the 1980s in Afghanistan
was great fun while it lasted, and there was no concern about
Osama and the boys until they decided that the U.S. was just
as unwelcome as the <U.S.S.R>.
But it must be someone else's fault,
so we'll topple the entire national structure of Afghanistan,
destroy much of its infrastructure, kill thousands of innocent
people, hold thousands more as illegal prisoners, and maybe go
on to attack other places that never heard of Osama bin Laden
just in case they're thinking about anything underhanded.
A former American diplomat has revealed
how hundreds of visas were rubber-stamped for Afghan fighters.
How else was it possible for 19 suspicious people to enter the
U.S., some working away for months, with no attention paid by
those immense, highly intrusive agencies, the CIA, FBI, and NSA,
whose snooping costs tens of billions of dollars every year?
Every phone call, fax, and e-mail in America, and a lot of other
places, is vetted daily by these agencies' batteries of super-computers.
After the attack on the World Trade Center,
there were many American news stories about two of these nineteen
people who possibly entered the U.S. by way of Canada - stories
that proved utterly false as it turned out. But huge pressures
were, and still are, being put on the Canadian government over
this concern. America simply blames someone else rather than
cleaning up its own house.
A few years ago, the world's richest
country suddenly decided to stop paying U.N. dues, ignoring its
long-standing treaty obligations. With an arrogant wave of the
hand, it dismissed its responsibilities and blamed the U.N. for
waste and bureaucracy. The "waste and bureaucracy"
stuff came from American legislators who spent years investigating
an insignificant, sour real estate deal and put on a colossal,
lunatic, government-stopping, impeachment-as-passion play spectacle.
The same folks now prepare to squander tens of billions on useless
new defense schemes and on measures to curtail American freedoms.
But the U.N. has to lobby and wheedle in hopes of receiving its
meager portion.
American technical experts analyzing
data from a Chinese thermonuclear test some years ago were stunned
to realize that the blast had a radiation "signature"
similar to that of America's most advanced warhead. Espionage
was immediately suspected, and the long, painful ordeal of Wen
Ho Lee, an American scientist born in Taiwan, began. While investigation
was reasonable, it was not reasonable to target Wen Ho Lee. His
career was ruined even though not a shred of clear evidence was
ever produced. The more rational conclusion that the Chinese,
a clever and resourceful people, had managed the feat themselves
stood little chance when someone from "there" was there
to blame.
The case of the Cuban boy Elian provided
what may be the most remarkable example of this kind of obtuse
and arrogant behavior. An ill-considered policy of granting automatic
refugee status to all Cubans who made it in flimsy boats to American
shores, part of an incessant campaign of hatred against Castro,
lured the boy's mother to her death, as it had lured many others.
The boy still had a loving father, other family, and friends,
but they just happened to live in the wrong country. So an already-injured
child was put through months of hell in Miami, a hostage to ideology
as surely as American diplomats in Iran, his father, family,
and home repeatedly ridiculed and insulted, and it was all someone
else's fault; Castro's in this case.
I closed by telling my reader that I
never object to letters that disagree with me, only to those
that are rude or insistent or obscene. And, I have to say, America
does generate an awful lot of those.
John Chuckman
lives in Ontario, Canada. He is a columnist for YellowTimes.
He can be reached at: jchuckman@YellowTimes.org
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