home / subscribe / donate / about us / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events

Inside the New Print Edition of CounterPunch: a Special Report by David Price on the CIA on Campus The CIA's New Campus Spies: Meet "PRISP", it may be at work on a campus near you. Program doles out cash to train tomorrow's spooks ; they say it's like ROTC, only it's all secret; a hundred spooklets on campus today; thousands down the road; pay back your loan by translating for torturers in tomorrow's Abu Ghraibs; meet PRISP's Frankenstein, Prof Felix Moos; anthropologists and the CIA, a deadly embrace by David Price; ALSO Alexander Cockburn on Disaster Relief as Scam; air-conditioned tents for the NGOs and money to burn; how tourist "development" deepened tsunami's impact; why governments love "relief". AND Humans and Woodchippers: When small isn't beautiful. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print 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! Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Wars of the Laptop Bombers   Today's Stories January 26, 2005 Toni Solo The US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality Eric Hobsbawm Delusions About Democracy Scott Fleming In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan Delgado Alexander Cockburn The CIA's New Campus Spies   January 25, 2005 Brian Cloughley Iraq as Disneyland Mike Roselle Satan is My Co-Pilot Josh Frank / Merlin Chowkwanyun The War on Civil Liberties John Chuckman Freedom on Steroids Paul Craig Roberts A Party Without Virtue Dr. Teresa Whitehurst The Intolerance of Christian Conservatives James Petras The US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela Website of the Day Lowbaggers for the Environment   January 24, 2005 Fred Gardner Last Monologue in Burbank Lori Berenson On the Politicization of My Case Uri Avnery King George January 22 / 23, 2005 Jennifer Van Bergen / Ray Del Papa Nuclear Incident in Montana Alexander Cockburn Prince Harry's Travails Jeffrey St. Clair The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded Stan Goff The Spectacle Saul Landau Nothing Succeeds Like Failure Gary Leupp Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran Fred Gardner Is GW Getting the Runaround? Phil Gasper Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California Stanley Heller A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death Greg Moses The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights Justin Taylor The Folk-Histories of John Ross Daniel Burton-Rose One China; Many Problems Elaine Cassel Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural Mike Whitney Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff Mark L. Berenson My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned Christopher Brauchli It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake Gilad Atzmon Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts Niranjan Ramakrishnan Day of the Rats Mark Donham The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel Ben Tripp Adventures in Online Dating Walter Brasch Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush? Poets' Basement Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum     January 21, 2005 Dave Lindorff A Great American Journalist: John L. Hess (1917-2005) Sharon Smith The Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance Don Santina Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria Ron Jacobs Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration Kurt Nimmo The Problem with Mike Ruppert Don Monkerud Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services Alan Farago Swimming Home from the Galapagos Derek Seidman An Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta Read How the Press & the CIA Killed Gary Webb's Career     January 20, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Dying for Sycophants William Cook The Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite Joshua Frank The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next Eric Ruder Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War Mike Whitney Coronation in a Garrison State Robert Jensen A Citizens Oath of Office Peter Rost Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions David Underhill Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test James Reiss Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom CounterPunch Staff Voices from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party       January 19, 2005 Marta Russell Social Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk Mike Ferner Marines Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo Nancy Oden The Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture Tony Paterson A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq Dave Lindorff Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security Doug Giebel BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies Alexander Cockburn Will Bush Quit Iraq?       January 18, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts How Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity Jennifer Van Bergen Federal Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva Conventions Douglas Lummis It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time Ron Jacobs Syria Back in the Crosshairs? Seth DeLong Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese Oil Pact? Lance Selfa Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire Paul D. Johnson Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins Elisa Salasin An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher     January 17, 2005 Heather Gray Misconceptions About King's Methods for Social Change Robert Fisk Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq Dave Lindorff What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US Military Jason Leopold Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One of Texas's Worst Polluters Gary Leupp A Message from the Iraqi Resistance Douglas Valentine An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King Harvey Arden Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier Greg Moses King and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option   January 15 / 16, 2005 James Petras The Kidnapping of a Revolutionary Robert Fisk Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad Ron Jacobs Unfit for Military Service Brian Cloughley Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza Fred Gardner The Allowable-Quantity Expert Dr. Susan Block The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005 John Ross Zapatista Literary Llife Suzan Mazur Unspooking Frank Carlucci M. Shahid Alam America's New Civilizing Mission Frederick B. Hudson Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man" Mike Whitney Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq Tom Crumpacker A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba Bob Burton The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal John Callender La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old Lila Rajiva Christian Zionism Saul Landau An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle Doug Soderstrom A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism Poets' Basement Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon     January 14, 2005 Robert Fisk "The Tent of Occupation" Lee Sustar Bush's Social Security Con Job José M. Tirado The Christians I Know Dave Zirin The Legacy of Jack Johnson Sheldon Rampton Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence" Tracy McLellan Under the Influence Yves Engler The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti Tom Barry Robert Zoellick: a Bush Family Man Website of the Day Ryan for the Nobel Prize?     January 13, 2005 Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer Hearts and Minds, Revisited Joe DeRaymond The Salvador Option: Terror, Elections and Democracy Greg Moses Every Hero a Killer?...Not Dave Lindorff The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting Jorge Mariscal Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos? Christopher Brauchli Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps Gary Leupp "Fighting for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America     January 12, 2005 Robert Fisk Fear Stalks Baghdad Josh Frank The Farce of the DNC Contest Jack Random Casualties of War: the Untold Stories John Roosa Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule Carol Norris In the Wake of the Tsunami Mike Whitney Pink Slips at CBS Alan Farago Can the Everglades be Saved? Paul Craig Roberts What's Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?     January 11, 2005 Tom Barry The US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon of Foreign Policy James Hodge and Linda Cooper Voice of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the the Americas Linda S. Heard Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia Derrick O'Keefe Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote Gila Svirsky A Tale of Two Elections Harry Browne Irish "Peace Process", RIP   January 10, 2005 Ramzy Baroud Faith-Based Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs Talli Nauman Killing Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press Uri Avnery Sharon's Monologue Dave Lindorff Tucker Carlson's Idiot Wind Dave Zirin Randy Moss's Moondance Dave Silver Left Illusions About the Democratic Party Charles Demers Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves William A. Cook Causes and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel     January 8 / 9, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Say, Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass? John H. Summers Chomsky and Academic History Greg Moses Getting Real About the Draft Walter A. Davis Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism Victor Kattan The EU and Middle East Peace John Bolender The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans Robert Fisk The Politics of Lebanon Fred Gardner Situation NORML Joe Bageant The Politics of the Comfort Zone Mickey Z. I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out Ben Tripp CounterClockwise Evolution Ron Jacobs Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61 Saul Landau Sex and the Country Rep. Cynthia McKinney Time to End the Blackout Ellen Cantarow NPR's Distortions on Palestine Richard Oxman Bageantry Continued Poets' Basement Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins January 7, 2005 Omar Barghouti Slave Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation Kent Paterson The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist Arrested Niranjan Ramakrishnan Old Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami David Krieger Cancel the Inauguration Parties Gideon Levy New Year, Old Story Dave Lindorff Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives Christopher Brauchli Privatizing the IRS Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor Bush, the Pentagon and the Tsunami     January 6, 2005 Brian J. Foley Gonzales: Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin Greg Moses Boot Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal Petras / Chomsky An Open Letter to Hugo Chavez Alan Maass The Decline of the Dollar Dave Lindorff Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror Jenna Orkin The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent P. Sainath The Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor     January 5, 2005 Alan Farago 2004: An Environmental Retrospective Winslow T. Wheeler Oversight Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam Jean-Guy Allard Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective Fred Gardner Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working David Swanson Albert Parsons on the Gallows Richard Oxman The Joe Bageant Interview Bruce Jackson Death on the Living Room Floor       January 4, 2005 Michael Ortiz Hill Mainlining Apocalypse Elaine Cassel They Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial Yoram Gat The Year in Torture Martin Khor Tragic Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster Gary Leupp Death and Life in the Andaman Islands   January 3, 2005 Ron Jacobs The War Hits Home Dave Lindorff Is There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters? Mike Whitney The Guantanamo Gulag Joshua Frank Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows Maria Tomchick Playing Politics with Disaster Aid Rhoda and Mark Berenson Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice David Swanson The Media and the Ohio Recount Kathleen Christison Patronizing the Palestinians     January 1 / 2, 2005 Gary Leupp Earthquakes and End Times, Past and Present Rev. William E. Alberts On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian Tendencies M. Shahid Alam Testing Free Speech in America Stan Goff A Period for Pedagogy Brian Cloughley Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant Sylvia Tiwon / Ben Terrall The Aftermath in Aceh Ben Tripp Requiem for 2004 Greg Moses A Visible Future? Steven Sherman The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire Sean Donahue The Erotics of Nonviolence James T. Phillips The Beast's Belly David Krieger When Will We Ever Learn Poets' Basement Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert         December 23, 2004 Chad Nagle Report from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood David Smith-Ferri The Real UN Disgrace in Iraq Bill Quigley Death Watch for Human Rights in Haiti Mickey Z. Crumbs from Our Table Christopher Brauchli Merck's Merry X-mas Greg Moses When No Law Means No Law Alan Singer An Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat David Price Social Security Pump and Dump Website of the Day Gabbo Gets Laid   December 22, 2004 James Petras An Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre Historical Amnesia Omar Barghouti The Case for Boycotting Israel Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit Harry Browne Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge Richard Oxman On the Seventh Column Kathleen Christison Imagining Palestine Website of the Day FBI Torture Memos     December 21, 2004 Greg Moses The New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV Dave Lindorff Losing It in America: Bunker of the Skittish Chad Nagle The View from Donetsk Dragon Pierces Truth* Concrete Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam Patrick Cockburn "Things Always Get Worse" Seth DeLong Aiding Oppression in Haiti Ahmad Faruqui Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report Paul Craig Roberts America Locked Up: a System of Injustice                                     Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

January 26, 2005 CounterPunch Diary Baghdad and Saigon; the CIA's New Campus Spies; More on Matron's Chill Hand and the Duke of Windsor's Diaper By ALEXANDER COCKBURN From Saigon to Baghdad Today, January 28, the US today lost a third of the soldiers it lost around Saigon on the first day of the Tet offensive thirty-six years ago. Even as George Bush was giving jesting with a docile press corps this morning, the CNN newswire running under the images of President Mushbrain disclosed that 36 American soldiers have died this same day. On January 30, 1968 the National Liberation Front launched its Tet offensive across South Vietnam. In the Tet assault on Saigon 110 US servicemen died, against 1,100 NLF. For a period the NLF took over large parts of the city and invaded the US embassy compound. When it was over, the US dead across South Vietnam ran to 1,100, and their South Vietnamese troops, 2,800. The NLF and the North Vietnamese Army lost 35,000 men killed, 60,000 wounded and 6000 POWs. Militarily the US claimed victory. But the Tet offensive was devastating in its impact on US opinion. And, yes, the US scheduled its Iraqi elections on the anniversary of Tet. The CIA's New Spies on Campus After disclosure of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's effort to set a new and spectacularly unaccountable version of the CIA in the Pentagon., the sprouting forest of secret intelligence operations set up in the wake of 9/11 is at last coming under some scrutiny. Here's sinister one in the academic field that one that that had escaped scrutiny until this week. Dr David Price, of St Martins College, in Olympia, Washington is an anthropologist long interested in the intersections of his discipline with the world of intelligence and national security, both the CIA and the FBI. CounterPunchers know Price's work well. Now he's turned the spotlight on a new test program, operating without detection or protest, that is secretly placing CIA agents in American university classrooms. With time these students who cannot admit to their true intentions will inevitably pollute and discredit the universities in which they are now enrolled. Subscribers to our CounterPunch newsletter are now receiving the edition with Price's full investigation. Herewith a brief resume of his expose. Even before 9/11 government money was being sluiced into the academies for covert subsidies for students. The National Security Education Program (NSEP) siphoned off students from traditional foreign language funding programs and offered graduate students good money, sometimes $40,000 a year and up, to study "in demand" languages, but with pay-back stipulations mandating that recipients later work for unspecified U.S. national security agencies. When the NSEP got off the ground in the early 1990s there was some huff and puff from concerned academics about this breaching of the supposed barrier between the desires of academia and the state. But there wasn't even a watch-pup's yap about Congressional approval for section 318 of the 2004 Intelligence Authorization Act which appropriated four million dollars to fund a pilot program known as the Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program (PRISP), named after Senator Pat Roberts (R. Kansas, Chair, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence). PRISP is designed to train intelligence operatives and analysts in American university classrooms for careers in the CIA and other agencies. The program now operates on an undisclosed number of American college and university campuses. Dr Price has discovered that if the pilot phase of the program proves to be a useful means of recruiting and training members of the intelligence community then the program will expand to more campuses across the country. PRISP participants must be American citizens who are enrolled fulltime in graduate degree programs. They need to "complete at least one summer internship at CIA or other agencies", and they must pass the same background investigations as other CIA employees. PRISP students receive financial stipends ranging up to $25,000 per year and they are required to participate in closed meetings with other PRISP scholars and individuals from their administering intelligence agency. From his enquiries Dr Price has determined that less than 150 students a year are currently authorized to receive funding during the pilot phase as PRISP evaluates the program's initial outcomes. PRISP is apparently administered not just by the CIA, but also through a variety of individual intelligence agencies like the NSA, MID, or Naval Intelligence. Secrecy is the root problem here, with the usual ill-based assumption that good intelligence operates best in clandestine conditions. Of course America needs good intelligence, but the most useful and important intelligence can largely be gathered openly without the sort of covert invasion of our campuses that PRISP silently brings. . Anyone doubting the superior merits of open intelligence has only to study the sorry saga of the non-existent WMDs whose imagined threat in vast stockpiles was ringingly affirmed by all the secret agencies, while being contested by analysts unencumbered by bogus covert intelligence estimates massaged by Iraqi disinformers and political placemen in Langley and elsewhere. Dr Price says, "The CIA makes sure we won't know which classrooms PRSIP scholars attend, this being rationalized as a requirement for protecting the identities of intelligence personnel." But this secrecy shapes PRISP as it takes on the form of a covert operation in which PRISP students study chemistry, biology, sociology, psychology, anthropology and foreign languages without their fellow classmates, professors, advisors, department chairs or presumably even research subjects (knowing that they are working for the CIA, DIA, NSA or other intelligence agencies. "In a decade and a half of Freedom of Information Act research," Dr Price continues, " I have read too many FBI reports of students detailing the 'deviant' political views of their professors." In one instance elicited by Dr Price from files he acquired under FOIA, the FBI arranged for a graduate student to guide topics of 'informal' conversation with anthropologist Gene Weltfish that were later the focus of an inquiry by Joseph McCarthy). Today, Dr Price maintains, "These PRSIP students are also secretly compiling dossiers on their professors and fellow students." The confluence between academe and intelligence is long standing and pervasive. In 1988 CIA spokeswoman Sharon Foster bragged that the CIA then secretly employed enough university professors "to staff a large university". Most experts estimate that this presence has grown since 2001. But If the CIA can use PRISP to corral students, haul along to mandatory internships and summer sessions, douse them in the ethos of CIA , then it can surely shape their intellectual outlook even before their grasp of cultural history develops in the relatively open environment of their university. Academic environments thrive on open disagreement, dissent, and reformulation. As Dr Price writes," The presence of PRISP's secret sharers brings hidden agendas that sabotage fundamental academic processes. The Pat Roberts Intelligence Scholars Program infects all academia with the viruses dishonesty and distrust as participant scholars cloak their intentions and their ties to the cloaked masters they serve." From the CounterPunch Mailbag Why those boyish testicles in matron's chill hand? Here are a couple of answers. Dear Mr. Cockburn, In your piece, "Prince Harry's Travails", you say: "How well I remember Matron at my own school, Heatherdown, who used to line us little boys up and then clasp our testicles in her chill hand and demand we cough. I'm never quite sure why; maybe to detect signs of incipient syphilis in case we eight-year olds had been infected by the girls at Heathfield, the other side of a wall even more forbidding than the one the Israelis are running through the occupied territories." The nominal answer is: to detect inguinal hernias. The Freudian analysis is more complex. Daniel Wirt MD, Houston. You crave more details? Here's Rowan Berkeley from London: A hernia can occur when a part of the intestine pushes out from the abdomen and into the groin or scrotum (the sac of skin that the testicles hang in). Some people believe that this can only happen when a person lifts something heavy, but usually this isn't the case. Most hernias occur because of a weakness in the abdominal wall that the person was born with. If a piece of intestine becomes trapped in the scrotum, it can cut off the blood supply to the intestine and cause serious problems if the situation isn't quickly corrected. A doctor is able to feel for a hernia by using his or her fingers to examine the area around the groin and testicles. The doctor may ask you to cough while he or she is pressing on or feeling the area. Sometimes, the hernia causes a bulge that the doctor can detect; if this happens, surgery almost always repairs the hernia completely. At least one CounterPuncher didn't care for another paragraph in that same diary of mine, which went as follows: In his wonderful The Duchess of Windsor (recently reissued with sensational new material along with his equally gripping Howard Hughes) my friend Charles Higham quotes the Duke's equerry, Sir Dudley Forwood, who used to peer through the bedroom keyhole, as saying of saying of Windsor that "It is doubtful whether he and Wallis ever actually had sexual intercourse in the normal sense of the word. However, she did manage to give him relief. He had always been a repressed foot fetishist, and she discovered this and indulged the perversity completely. They also, at his request, became involved in elaborate erotic games. These included nanny-child scenes: he wore diapers, she was the master." Jason Rhodes wrote: a) people who look through keyholes and report on bedroom activity are such human scum that they are ipso facto untrustworthy, and have no place in any account of anything b) what goes on between consenting adults behind closed doors is private, even among the worst people. criticize what they do on a social level ­ don't try to shame them, even post humously, with what they did with their genitals. i'm taking it too seriously. i don't realize that these all these people are just the flabby, pathetic, mind-addled so-called british royalty. they deserve any and all vulgarities we commoners can throw at them. etc. etc. but it doesn't wash. people who look and tell, in hopes to shame, are far more effective sexual police than any alabama sodomy law. i hate it, and the implication that we all should perhaps stop and make sure that our own sex somehow measures up to a new standard of "counterpunch" normal. what's wrong with feet, diapers and nanny the bedroom? do we all have to like sex like you? peace, and power to the people --jason rhodes seoul, korea Hi Jason, Despite what you charge, I can't say I have any problem relaying Sir Dudley Forword's observations. When he told Higham what he'd seen through the keyhole, the Duke and Duchess were long dead, as you note. And I don't think Forwood had anything to gain by making stuff up. Higham didn't pay him. And he wasn't trying to shame the Duke. Like most English people he just wanted to gossip. He even gossipped vigorously about himself, so Higham told me, about the preferences of some of his previous wives. His current partner at the time of Higham's interview at the Forword manse in the New Forest referred jestingly to Sir Dudley's knee ailments incurred through long years of klyditrykascopy. We shouldn't take any of it too seriously. It helps to know what makes people tick; whether they were being blackmailed etc etc. Best Alex And on another front Ian Miller wrote: In her article "The Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance" on the CounterPunch web site Sharon Smith states: "To be meaningful, however, supporting the 'right to resist' must include support for that resistance once it actually emerges." I beg to differ. Supporting a right in principle is not the same as supporting the right to pursue that principle through violence. I do not think that there is any contradiction in supporting the aims of the Iraqi resistance while condemning their methods. Ms Smith's argument is fundamentally the same as the war-party's claim, shortly after the start of hostilities, that it was a patriotic duty to support the war once it had started. I rejected that argument, as I reject Smith's. Ian Miller WWW http://www.counterpunch.org