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/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
June
11, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Ray Charles' Legacy of Spirit
Chris
Floyd
Funeral Games
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Remembering Reagan
Norman
Solomon
Media's Mourning in America
Alexander
Cockburn
Reagan in Truth and Fiction
June
10, 2004
Noam
Chomsky
The Apotheosis of Reagan : Divinity
Through Marketing
Gary
Leupp
Bush, the Religious Scholar
Patrick
Cockburn
The Iraqi Street Has Spoken: New
Govt. Made Up of CIA Pawns
Saul
Landau
Force-Feeding Lies About Free Trade
Scott
Evans
Settling for the System: How Punkvoter.com Became Just Another
Tool of the Democrats
Jacob
Levich
John Kerry's World of Hurt: Senator Supports Beam Weapons
Zeynep
Toufe
Reagan, Neo-Cons and the "Intelligence Failures"
Nico
Pitney
Reform at Wal-Mart?
Dave
Zirin
Son of a Reagan: What a Sporty 6-Year Old Saw at the Revolution
Jack
McCarthy
Where Were You When Reagan Croaked?
Gary
Corseri
Nouns That Should be Acronyms
David
Price
Reagan and the Black Budget
Website
of the Day
Inequality by the Numbers
June
9, 2004
Mustafa
Barghouthi
Israel's Common Use of Torture
Must be Exposed
Mike
Whitney
Alan Dershowitz, Still Defending
Torture
John
Chuckman
Why the CIA will Always be a Costly Flop
Jim
Tarbell / Roger Burbach
Bush's Democratic Charade in Iraq
Dave
Lindorff
Put Reagan on the $3 Bill
Miguel
D'Escoto
Reagan was the Butcher of My People
Becky
Burgwin
The Betrayal of Smarty Jones: Flogging a Natural Born Hero
Patrick
Cockburn
The Rich Have Been Warned to Leave
Baghdad
June
8, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Nature of Ronald Reagan: Will
the Earth Accept His Corpse?
Dave
Lindorff
The March on Rumsfeld's House: Is
the US Anti-War Movement Running Out of Steam?
Phillip
Cryan
Torture, Bombings & the Press in
Colombia
Mark
Zepezauer
Getting Reagan Wrong
Mickey
Z.
Reagan, Radicals and Repetitive Reactions
John
L. Hess
Reagan and Bush in Normandy
Alex
Dawoody
Reagan and Saddam: the Unholy Alliance
Christopher
Fons
Reagan in a Word: Mean
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Some Tenets are More Important Than Others
Ahmed
Bouzid
Nothing New Under the Israeli Sun
Michael
Leon
Bush the Narcissist
June
7, 2004
Jason
Leopold
New Enron Docs Show Lay and Skilling
Knew of California Trading Schemes
Patrick
Cockburn
The Baghdad Bombings: the Pattern
of Attacks is Changing
Dennis
Hans
From Afghanistan to El Salvador: Reagan's
Dark Global Legacy
Tracy
McLellan
Nader at the National Press Club:
a Glimpse at a Different Kind of Politics
Bill
Blum
The Myth of the Gipper: Reagan Didn't
End the Cold War
Ben
Tripp
What I Owe Reagan: the Brylcreemed
Bullshitter
Susan
Davis
Reagan, In a Nutshell
Phil
Gasper
Reagan: Goodbye and Good Riddance
Website
of the Day
A Child's ABCs of Terrorism
June
5 / 6, 2004
C.
Douglas Lummis
Toward a Universal Declaration of
Human Wrongs
Saul
Landau
Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession
Dave
Lindorff
John Walker Lindh, Revisited
Brian
Cloughley
Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong
Rich
Gibson
The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
Elaine
Cassel
A Sorry FBI
Cathrin
Schütz
On the Ruins of Yugoslavia
Ben
Tripp
Call Me, Mr. Cassandra
Kurt
Nimmo
The Madness of King George
Ron
Jacobs
They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So)
Laura
Flanders
The Lynne Cheney Show?
Lenni
Brenner
Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met
Abigail
Jones
Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy
Prisoner?
Mark
Latham
Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes
Gerry
Adams
I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too
Toni
Solo
Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised
Derek
Seidman
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old
M.
Junaid Alam
Torture is Just the Symptom
Matt
Siegfried
An American Way of War
Dave
Zirin
The Politics of Charles Barkley
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Krieger, St. Clair
Website
of the Weekend
Overnight Sensations
June
4, 2004
Chris
Floyd
Masked and Anonymous: Inside America's
Animal House
Cornwell
/ Penketh
Exit Tenet: the Fall of a Fall Guy
Wayne
Madsen
Apprehension & Frustation: Neo-Cons on the Brink
Greg
Moses
Agitating for Workers' Rights in Iraq
Yitzak
Laor
Before Rafah
Ghali
Hassan
Ambassador to Death Squads: Who is Negroponte?
Jane
Stillwater
God, the Rapture and Vera Casey
CounterPunch
Wire
D-Day Reconsidered: Was It Really Worth the Carnage?
John
Borowski
Woo-Wooism v. Meteorites: Why the Dems Are No Match for Bush
Mike
Griffin
Caterpillar's Assault on the UAW
Alexander Cockburn
Has Bush Gone Over the Edge?
Website
of the Day
Aquae Urbis Romae:
Water and Empire
June
3, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Iran's Nuclear Dilemma
Dr.
Susan Block
America in tha Hood
Michael
Donnelly
The Bully and the Brahmin
John
Chuckman
Insanity in America: US Ranks Number
One in the Deranged
Christopher
Brauchli
The Return of Cardinal Law: Rome
on $12,000 a Month
Samia
Nassar Melki
Caravaggio in Iraq
Mike
Whitney
Subverting Justice: Pre-Trial Ruminations in the Padilla Case
Diane
Rejman
Memorial Day Isn't Just About the Dead
Scott
Morris
"WMDs" in Cuba
Paul
de Rooij
Palestinian Misery in Perspective
June
2, 2004
Brian
Cloughley
The Liars are Winning
Ray
McGovern
How Far Would They Go? Beware "Credible
Intelligence"
Josh
Frank
The Anybody But Bush Offensive
Mike
Whitney
The Afghanistan Failure: Bush's Warlord Patriots
Jackie
Corr
Iraq and Ireland: Three Tales from Butte, Montana
Robert
Jensen
The US Lost the Iraq War...and It's a Good Thing, Too
Alexander
Cockburn
"Bye, Bye Boonville!"
June
1, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Instant Karma: Bush's Sins Catch Up
with Him
William
A. Cook
Manufacturers of Fear and Loathing in
Rafah
Dave
Lindorff
Will the Times Clean House?
Kevin
Zeese
Inside the Kerry / Nader Meeting: Did
the Kerry Campaign Lie About What Was Discussed?
Jacob
Levich
Coming Soon: Return of the Draft,
a Bipartisan Production
Kathy
Kelly
Voices in the Wilderness v. the US
Government
Website
of the Day
Remind Us
May
29 / 31, 2004
Lee
Ballinger / Dave Marsh
The Origins of Memorial Day
Janine
Pommy Vega
Memo for Memorial Day
Mike
Ferner
On Their Way to Abu Ghraib
Alfred
W. McCoy
The Cruel Shadow: the Long History of CIA Torture Research
Douglas
Valentine
An Open Letter to the NYT: Questions, Questions, Questions
Chris
White
First to Fight Culture: a Former Marine on the Marine Motto
Bruce
Anderson
The Awful Injustice to Tai Abreu
David
Vest
Get Ready for Kerry's War: the 100 Year Quagmire
Saul
Landau
Torture: the Logical Outcome of Bush's War for Democracy?
Kurt
Nimmo
Abu Hamza al-Mazri, Made in the USA
Elaine
Cassel
The Secrets of Surveillance: Ashcroft, Snoops, and Gag Orders
Will
Potter
The New War on "Terror": Protest the Torture of Chimps;
Get Arrested as a "Terrorist"
Ben
Tripp
They Fiddled While Nero Got the Matches
Dr.
Susan Block
Save Abu Ghraib!
Kia
Kojouri
Nukes, the US, Israel and Iran: an
Interview with Sasan Fayazmanesh
Mickey
Z
D-Day: 60 Years is Enough!
Jon
Brown
Correcting the Correction at the Times
Patrick
B. Barr
Pre-emptive War Insurance
Stephen
Gowans
Bad Apples in a Bad Barrel
Tom
Gorman
Gore on Bush in Iraq: the Approach May be Exotic, But It's Hardly
New
Dave
Zirin
Fighting for Boxers' Rights: an Interview with Eddie Mustafa
Muhammad
Gregory
Weiher
Bush to Arabs: "Go Get Yourself Some Democracy"
Erik
Cummings
Jung Meets Bush
Poets'
Basement
Davies, Ford, Kearney, McLellan and Albert
May
28, 2004
Rafael
Rodriguez Cruz
Curtain of Silence on the Cuban 5
Greg
Moses
Bush's Misleading Speech on Abu Ghraib
Dave
Lindorff
Dissing Independent Contractors:
Those Who Do the Dirty Work
Norman
Solomon
Leaping for Lies at the Times
Rep.
Bill Delahunt
Bush's Cruel New Rules on Cuba
Paul
McGeough
Chalabi Baba and the 40 Thieves
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India and Nehru: 40 Years After
Alexander
Cockburn
NYTs: "Maybe We Did Screw Up...a
Little"
May
27, 2004
Amy
Goodman / David Goodman
Fatal Errors: the Lies of Our Times
Douglas
Valentine
Ragging the Dogs of War at the
NYTs
John
L. Hess
The Times Confesses...Kind Of
Stew
Albert
Dellinger, the Wrestling Pacifist
Dave
Dellinger
a 1993 Interview
Christopher
Brauchli
Tax Breaks for Scions...to Hell with Poor Kids
Rampton
/ Stauber
Banana Republicans: Pumping Irony
May
26, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Goodbye, David Dellinger: He Was a
Friend of Ours
Robert
Fisk
The Things Bush Didn't Say in His Speech
Zeynep
Toufe
New Draft UN Resolution Permits Perpetual Occupation
Conn
Hallinan
Bush and Sharon: the Oil Connection
Tom
Stephens
2 + 2 is On My Mind: More Morons
and War Crimes
Derek
Medley
Protesting Gov. Bigot
CounterPunch
Wire
FBI Abducts Artist; Seizes Art
Andrew
Cockburn
The Trail to Tehran
May
25, 2004
Joe
Bageant
The Covert Kingdom: On Earth as It
is in Texas
Col.
Dan Smith
A Question of Human Dignity
Gary
Handschumacher
Visiting Lori Berenson: Time to Bring Her Home
Toni
Solo
A Developing War in the Andes
Marc
Estrin
September Song: Disturbing Questions
About 9/11
Stephen
Banko, III
A Vietnam Vet on "Supporting the
Troops"
Website
of the Day
The Wizard of Whimsy
May
24, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
Dan Senor is Safe!
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Tricks & TortureGate: the
Missing Taguba Pages
Sam
Hamod
Gen. Zinni: "Wrong War, Wrong
Place, Wrong Time"
Mike
Whitney
The Wedding was a Bomb
Stan
Goff
Open Season on MAMs
Image
of the Day
A Photo from Abu Ghraib We Didn't See on the Front Page of the
NYTs
May
22 / 23, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
Colin Powell, a Political Obituary
Jeffrey
St. Clair
When War is Swell: Bush and the Carlyle Group
Elizabeth
Weill-Greenberg
Her Son Was Told He Wouldn't See Combat; Now He's Dead: an Interview
with Sue Niederer
Brian
Cloughley
America is Committing War Crimes in Iraq
Saul
Landau
Democracy in Latin America: Great for Investors; Not So Good
for People
Brandy
Baker
Feminists Stand By Their Man: Abortion, Judges and Kerry
Randall
Robinson
Bushwhacked in the Caribbean
Uri
Avnery
The Rape of Rafah
Ben
Tripp
Assume the Worst
Bruce
Anderson
News from Ecotopia: the Truth About the Wine Business
Josh
Ruebner
Why I Burned My Israeli Military Papers
Peter
Wolson, Ph. D.
Exhibitionistic Revenge at Abu Ghraib
Chloe
Cockburn
In Defense of "Troy": What Hector Could Teach Rummy
Linda
Burnham
Sexual Domination in Uniform: an American Value
Adrien
Rain Burke
War of the Necrophiliacs: Spc. Sabrina Harman and Her Corpse
David
Krieger
Charting a New Course for US Nuclear Policy
Ron
Jacobs
Turnaround
Poets'
Basement
Ford, Albert & LaMorticella
May 21, 2004
Ray
Close
The Canards of the Apologists
Christopher
Brauchli
"The Object of Torture is Torture"
Amira
Hass
Darkness at Noon
Jack
McCarthy
Camilo Mejia: Can the Son of a Sandinista Get a Fair Trial from
the US Army?
Bill
Kauffman
Nader v. Bush
Omar
Barghouti
No More Tears for America
Ghali
Hassan
Moral Failure of the "Free World" in Gaza
Christopher
Reed
How the CIA Taught the Portuguese to
Torture
Website
of the Day
Eric Idle on the Bush Administration: Fuck You, So Very Much
May
20, 2004
Andrew
Cockburn
The Truth About Chalabi
Kathy
Kelly
A Visit from the FBI
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Brown and Bored of Education in India
Tom
Stephens & John Philo
The War Crimes of Bush, Cheney & Co.
Sam
Bahour / Michael Dahan
Genocide by Public Policy
Robert
Ovetz
Ending the Race for the Last Turtle
Billy
Wilson
The Most Important Thing I Learned at School This Year
Website
of the Day
Rafah Today
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.
|
June
11, 2004
Ronald
Reagan in Truth and Fiction (and Yes, He Doomed the Crew of the
Challenger)
Jayson
Blair, Alive and Well at the New York Times
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Pentagon Cartoons
They keep talking about Reagan being
a "big picture" man, indifferent to petty detail. The
phrase gives a false impression, as though Reagan looked out
at the world as though at some Cinemascope epic, a vast battlefield
where, through those famous spectacles (one lense close-up, for
speech reading, the other long-distance) he could assess the
global balance of forces. Wrong. Reagan stayed awake only for
the cartoons, where the global balance of forces were set forth
in simple terms, in the tiffs between Mickey Mouse and Donald
Duck, or Tom and Jerry.
When he became president, and
thus "commander in chief" the Joint Chiefs of Staffs
mounted their traditional show-and-tell briefings for him, replete
with simple charts and a senior general explicating them in simple
terms. Reagan found these briefings way too complicated and dozed
off. The Joint Chiefs then set up a secret unit, staffed by cartoonists.
The balance of forces were set forth in easily accessible caricature,
with Soviet missiles the size of upended Zeppelins, pulsing on
their launchpads, with the miniscule US ICBMs shrivelled in their
bunkers. Little cartoon bubbles would contain the points the
joint chiefs wanted to hammer into Reagan's brain, most of them
to the effect that "we need more money". Reagan really
enjoyed the shows and sometimes even asked for repeats.
There was no internationally
recognized border in Reagan's own mind between fantasy and fact,
the dividing line having been abolished in the early 1940s when
his studio's PR department turned him into a war hero, courtesy
of his labors in "Fort Wacky" in Culver City, where
they made training films. The fanzines disclosed the loneliness
of R.R.'s first wife, Jane Wyman, her absent man (a few miles
away in Fort Wacky, home by suppertime) and her knowledge of
R.R.'s hatred of the foe. "She'd seen Ronnie's sick face,"
Modern Screen reported in 1942, "bent over a picture of
the small, swollen bodies of children starved to death in Poland.
'This,' said the war-hating Reagan between set lips, 'would make
it a pleasure to kill.'" A photographer for Modern Screen
recalled later that, unlike some stars who were reluctant to
offer themselves to his lense in "hero's" garb, Reagan
insisted on being photographed on his front step in full uniform,
kissing his wife goodbye.
Reagan had absolutely no moral
sense about truth or falsity. Forty years after Fort Wacky, as
commander-in-chief, R.R. told Yitzhak Shamir, then prime minister
of Israel, that he had helped to liberate Auschwitz, had returned
to Hollywood with film footage of the ghastly scenes he had witnessed,
and if in later years anyone controverted the reality of the
Holocaust over the Reagan dinner table, he would roll the footage
till the doubts were stilled. He said the same thing to Rabbi
Martin Hier of Los Angeles. It was all fantasy, but I'm sure
Reagan believed it, the same way he regarded his trip to the
SS cemetery in Bitburg as a useful reminder to Europeans of the
great days of World War II, when the people of the Free World-American,
British, French and German-fought shoulder to shoulder against
Soviet totalitarianism.
The problem for the press (which
groveled before him, at least until the Iran-contra scandal broke)
was that Reagan didn't really care that he'd been caught out
with another set of phony statistics or a bogus anecdote about
Auschwitz. Truth, for him, was what he happened to be saying
at the time. When the Iran/contra scandal broke, he held a press
conference in which he said to Helen Thomas, "I want to
get to the bottom of this and find out all that has happened.
And so far, I've told you all that I know and, you know, the
truth of the matter is, for quite some time, all that you knew
was what I'd told you." He went one better that George Wasdhington
in that he could't tell a lie and he couldn't tell the truth,
since he couldn't tell the difference between the two.
His mind was a wastebasket
of old clippings from Popular Science , SF magazines (the origin
of Star Wars) lines from movies and homely saws from the Reader's
Digest and the Sunday supplements. He had a stout belief in astrology,
the stars being the twinkling penumbra of his incandescent belief
in the "free market," with whose motions it was blasphemous
to tamper. Astrologers exulted when they saw his visit to Bitburg
was timed to coincide with a concurrence of a full moon while
at its perigree with the earth, along with a total eclipse of
the moon. Elsewhere in the heavens Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and
Pluto appeared to move retrograde. The same four planets appeared
retrograde a year later when Reagan bombed Libya.
He believed Armageddon was
right around the corner. He also believed tomato ketchup could
be classified as a school meal, striking back at the nose-candy
crowd who, as Stevie Earle once said, spent the Seventies trying
to get cocaine classified as a vegetable.
Hearing all the cosy talk about
the Gipper, young people spared the experience of his awful sojourn
in office, probably imagine him as a kindly, avuncular figure.
He was a vicious man, with a breezy indifference to suffering
and the consequences of his decisions. This indifference was
so profound that Dante would surely have consigned him to one
of the lowest circles of hell, to roast for all eternity in front
of a tv set on the blink and a dinner tray swinging out of reach
like the elusive fruits that tortured Tantalus. And talking of
torture, there wasn't a torturer in Latin America who didn't
raise a cheer when Reagan was elected even though Carter hadn't
cramped their style particularly.They were right to exult. In
Guatemala, Rios Montt plunged into his darkest butcheries. David
Rockefeller made haste to Buenos Aires to tell the generals that
with Reagan's election a new era of understanding had been launched.
A CIA-inspired torture manual surfaced from El Salvador, though
the US press made little of it at the time. RENAMO perpetrated
ghastly massacres in Mozambique, spurred on and paid for by Reagan's
men.
He hailed the contra murderers
attacking Nicaragua as the "moral equivalent of the founding
fathers" (though the Iroquois would probably have agreed).
Fresh from honoring the SS men buried in Bitburg he went two
days later to Spain where he declared that the Lincoln Brigaders
and the defenders of the Republic had fought on the wrong side.
He was surrounded by scoundrels large and small. Probably the
worst was William Casey, head of the CIA, who stood at the head
of a vast cavalcade of fringe players, all the way down to the
Neocons who flocked to his standard.
I have boundless faith in the American people, but it is startling
to see the lines of people sweating under a hot sun waiting to
see Reagan's casket. How could any of them take the dreadful
old faker seriously? The nearest thing to it I can think of is
the hysteria over Princess Di. In its way , the "outpouring"
reminds me of what, nearly 20 years ago, I termed "news
spasms", expertly fuelled by the imagineers in the Reagan
White House. These spasms, Nuremberg rallies really, were totalitarian
in structure and intent, obsessively monopolistic of newsprint
and the airwaves, forcing a "national mood" of consensus,
with Reagan (in this reprise, his casket) as master of ceremonies.
Particularly memorable spasm events included the downing of KAL
007, the destruction of the US Marine barracks outside Beirut,
the Achille Lauro hijackings and the explosion of the Challenger
space shuttle of January 28, 1986,, which disaster prompted one
of the peak kitsch moments in a presidency that was kitsch from
start to finish. Reagan ended his address to the nation thus:
"We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them,
this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved good-bye
and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of
God'."
In fact it was the White House
that had doomed Christa McAuliffe and her companions to be burned
alive in the plummeting Challenger. The news event required the
Challenger to go into orbit and be flying over Congress while
Reagan was delivering his state of the union address. He was
to tilt his head upward and, presumably gazing through the long-distance
half of his spectacles, send a presidential greeting to the astronauts.
But this schedule required an early morning launch from chill
January Canaveral. Servile NASA officials ordered the Challenger
aloft, with the frozen O-ring fatally compromised.
Nixon thought Reagan was "strange"
and, so he told the secret tape recorder in the Oval Office in
1972, "just an uncomfortable man to be around." The
late President certainly was a very weird human being, not at
all like the fellow being hailed this week as the man who gave
America back its sense of confidence and destiny after the Carter
years.
The ceremonial schedule for
Reagan's corpse the week after his death had it lying "in
repose" for several days. What else was it supposed to be
doing? Anyway, Reagan always stuck to his script, and even if
he had come to in the presidential library in Simi Valley, he
would have stayed with his allotted role and lain doggo.
Reagan was "in repose"
much of his second term, his day easing forward through a forgiving
schedule of morning nap, afternoon snooze, TV supper and early
bed. He couldn't recall the names of many of his aides, even
of his dog. Stories occasionally swirled around Washington that
his aides pondered from time to time whether to invoke the Twenty-fifth
Amendment. Thatcher had it right for once at his funeral when
she said that Reagan "is more himself than ever." I
saw him at the Republican convention in New Orleans in August
of 1988, where he sat in his presidential box entirely immobile,
with the kind of somber passivity one associates with the shrouded
figure in some newly opened Egyptian tomb before oxygen commences
its mission of decay. I never saw him being "sunny,"
a favorite adjective of the hagiographers. As an orator or "communicator"
he was terrible, with one turgid cliché following another,
delivered in a folksy drone. His range of rhetorical artifice
was terribly limited.
After Jimmy Carter's timid
efforts to make America adjust to late-twentieth-century realities,
Reagan installed fantasy as the motor of national consciousness,
and it's still pumping disastrously along. He was an awful President,
never as popular as the press pretended, presiding over a carnival
of corruption and greed at home, terror in Central America and
Africa. On March 23, 1983, a friend of mine watched as a naval
officer and a defense contractor in the Fort Myer Officers' Club
in Virginia listened impatiently as Reagan churned his way through
a longish overture to his excited launch of Star Wars. Then,
as Reagan began to token forth the billion-dollar feeding trough
of SDI, they screamed to each other in incredulous delight, "He's
going to do it...he's doing it...he's done it! We're rich, we're
rich!" With these words, they both made a rush to the telephones.
There were many such screams
of joy for the rich down through Reagan-time and beyond. The
East Coast elite distrusted him as late as the 1980 campaign,
trying to head off his nomination by running Gerald Ford again.
Learning of the Ford bid, Reagan turned to an aide and cried,
"What have they got against me? I support big oil. I support
big business. Why don't they trust me?" Probably because
they thought he would blow them up, along with everyone else.
He didn't, but they never did trust him, though they had a hell
of a party while he was around.
The people who did trust Reagan
were mostly white men, small-business owners, some (sometimes
many) construction workers, many ordinary folk up and down the
map who wanted a world much as it had been in the 1950s. Them
he betrayed. Reagan's rhetoric was anti-government, but in fact
he was pressing programmatically for a different use of government
power, in which the major corporations would occupy a much stronger
position. The tendencies he presided over were probably inevitable,
given the balance of political forces after the postwar boom
hit the ceiling in the late 1960s. Then it was a matter of triage,
as the rich made haste to consolidate their position. It was
a straight line from Reagan's crude attacks on welfare queens
to Clinton's compassionate chewings of the lip (same head wag
as RR's) as he swore to "end welfare as we know it".
As a pr man, it was Reagan's role, as it was Thatcher's,m to
reassure the wealthy and the privileged that not only might but
right was on their side.
As Reagan shambled toward the
stairway of Air Force One at Andrews Air Force Base on Inauguration
Day, 1989, Bryant Gumbel mused to Tom Brokaw that this seemed
to him "quite remarkable." It turned out that Gumbel
was mightily impressed that the 78-year-old Reagan had not sought
to stave off retirement by mounting a coup d'état. All
around the world, Gumbel said, leaders "cling to power."
James Baker, the man who, with Paul Volcker, ran the world for
Reagan, probably could have done it. The press would have gone
along. As it was, Baker just bided his time for twelve years.
Jayson Blair
Alive and Well at NYT
The brother called from Washington
DC, peevish. I told him that I'd sent him his check by CounterPunch's
long-time courier, Bernie the Tortoise and that at last report
Berniie was somewhere along I-80 n Nevada and should be in DC
by Christmas. But it wasn't the money. Andrew was irked because
right there, June 9, in the New York Times was a story by Joel
Brinkley, datelined Washington DC, headlined "Ex-C.I.A.
Aides Say Iraq Leader Helped Agency in 90's Attacks"
Here's how Brinkley's story
began.
"Iyad Allawi, now the
designated prime minister of Iraq, ran an exile organization
intent on deposing Saddam Hussein that sent agents into Baghdad
in the early 1990's to plant bombs and sabotage government facilities
under the direction of the C.I.A., several former intelligence
officials say.
"Dr. Allawi's group, the
Iraqi National Accord, used car bombs and other explosive devices
smuggled into Baghdad from northern Iraq, the officials said.
Evaluations of the effectiveness of the bombing campaign varied,
although the former officials interviewed agreed that it never
threatened Saddam Hussein's rule.
"No public records of
the bombing campaign exist, and the former officials said their
recollections were in many cases sketchy, and in some cases contradictory.
They could not even recall exactly when it occurred, though the
interviews made it clear it was between 1992 and 1995."
What was irking Andrew was
that that was a scoop which had first been told by our brother,
Patrick Cockburn, in the Independent. He ran the piece just as
Clinton was addressing an anti-terrrorist jamboree in Sharm al-Sheikh,
Egypt. Patrick had a video of Allawi's terrorist in place, Abu
Amneh, describing in detail his forays in CIA-financed terror.
Then Andrew and Patrick had
developed the story further in their book on Saddam, Out of the
Ashes, republished last year as Saddam: An American Obsession,
stuffed with explosive revelations of the CIA's efforts to mount
coups against Saddam and to assassinate him, through the Nineties.
Brinkley's story came either
first hand from Patrick's piece in the Independent, or from the
book, or from former CIA people like Bob Baer who themselves
got it from the book.
I told Andrew not to get too
upset. The Times rips people off all the time. Jayson Blair's
mistake was to have been a black cocaine addict who swiped unimportant
stuff and forgot to tuck a shy little acknowledgement in the
penultimate paragraph about the Independent having obtained a
tape of Abu Amneh. That's what Brinkley did.
Here's the story, as told by
Andrew and Patrick in Saddam: An American Obsession.
The amateur cameraman focused
on the dark suited man with a scraggly mustache sitting behind
the paper strewn desk. It was mid-winter, and the Zagros mountains
of northern Iraq, visible through the window behind the desk
were topped with snow. Just outside, traffic thronged the busy
street in downtown Sulaimaniyah, the capital of eastern Kurdistan.
Staring fixedly into the lens,
his rodent-like face showing signs of extreme nervousness, Abu
Amneh al-Khadami began to recount his career as a terrorist bomber
for the CIA.
No one had ever claimed responsibility
for the bomb blasts that echoed around Baghdad in 1994 and 1995.
One explosion had gone off
in a cinema, another in a mosque. A car-bomb outside the offices
of al-Joumoriah, the Baath party newspaper, had wounded a large
number of passers-by and killed a child.
Altogether, the bombs had killed
as many as a hundred civilians. Uday, Saddam's eldest son who
was making a bid for political power, put the blasts to good
use, publicising them as a means of undermining his uncle, interior
minister Watban Ibrahim. Now, on January 25, 1996, Abu Amneh
had brought the video camera to his office to record the history
of his role in the lethal blasts.
For the next hour and a half,
he talked steadily, pausing only to light cigarettes, occasionally
holding up operational orders from his paymaster to illustrate
the story. This was not a confession by a repentant murderer,
but a rambling complaint that his work for the cause had been
impeded by lack of explosives and money.
The bombings, explained Amneh,
had been planned and executed on the orders of "Adnan".
He was referring to Adnan Nuri,
the former general in Saddam's army who had been recruited by
the CIA in 1992 to work directly for the agency. Since that time
Nuri had risen to command the operations of the opposition Iraqi
National Accord in Kurdistan. His mission, as mandated by the
CIA, was to work on preparations for a coup inside the Iraqi
military that would, finally, eliminate Saddam.
Nuri had recruited him from
a jail in Salahudin, where he had been incarcerated by Massoud
Barzani's KDP for attempting to kill an official of the INC.
He claimed his release was due to a direct intervention by the
CIA, quoting Nuri's boast that he "made the American in
Washington telephone Masud Barzani the Kurdish leader, to say
"'Let Abu Amneh out of prison'." Once freed, he was
ordered to move from Salahudin to Sulaimaniyah and set to work.
But in time he came to suspect that Nuri was in fact an Iraqi
agent, intent on handing him over to Baghdad. He was therefore
making the tape to alert the leadership of the Iraqi National
Accord to the perfidy of their representative in Kurdistan.
The aim of the bombing campaign,
by Amneh's account, was to impress Nuri's sponsors at the CIA
with the operational reach of the organisation they were funding.
To that end, the agent was commissioned not only to plant bombs
but also to hand out leaflets in the streets of Baghdad. Distributing
opposition propaganda in the heart of Saddam's capital would
be a risky undertaking at the best of times, but the dangers
were magnified by Nuri's insistence that the distribution be
recorded on camera as proof that the leaflets had not simply
been dumped. "Those leaflets", complained Amneh as
he held up one such picture, "cost us more than a bomb.
A bomb - somebody just takes it and leaves it. Leaflets need
two people: one to take photographs and the other to hand out
the leaflets."
Despite such precautions, Amneh
described Nuri as continually fretting that "the Americans
will cut off financial aid to us."
Whether or not Nuri's funding
was curtailed, the burden of the bomber's complaint concerned
the way his superior continually short-changed him on pay and
expenses. "We blew up a car and we were supposed to get
$2,000 but Adnan gave us $1,000," he grumbled at one point,
going on to gripe that at a supply dump meant to contain two
tons of explosives he had been given only 100 lbs, the dump's
custodian claiming that the rest had been stolen. He had not
been able to buy a car or pay the dozen men on his team. On one
occasion Nuri had paid him with dollars that turned out to be
forged. Despite his position as a sub-contractor for the richest
intelligence agency in the world, he "had to buy clocks
in the soukh (market) and turn them into timers."
Tired of playing catch-up with
reality through papers like the New York Times? If you want to
see what really good real-time reporting can be like, best order,
right now, Imperial
Crusades, by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair. It's
about the selling of the wars on Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and
Iraq, and it's hot off the presses, an amazing journal of imperial
propaganda, accurately dissected by CounterPunch on a week by
week basis. Don't wait, order one up from this site now, or call
1-800-840-3683. Our business staff is standing by.
Weekend
Edition Features for June 5 / 6, 2004
C.
Douglas Lummis
Toward a Universal Declaration of
Human Wrongs
Saul
Landau
Five Cubans in Prison, Victims of Bush's Obsession
Dave
Lindorff
John Walker Lindh, Revisited
Brian
Cloughley
Apologies, Please, From Those Who Got It Wrong
Rich
Gibson
The Grenada 17: the Last Prisoners of the Cold War are Black
Elaine
Cassel
A Sorry FBI
Cathrin
Schütz
On the Ruins of Yugoslavia
Ben
Tripp
Call Me, Mr. Cassandra
Kurt
Nimmo
The Madness of King George
Ron
Jacobs
They Ain't Goin' Nowhere (Unless We Make It So)
Laura
Flanders
The Lynne Cheney Show?
Lenni
Brenner
Renaissance Noir: Caravaggio at the Met
Abigail
Jones
Whatever Happened to Lori Berenson, President Toledo's Trophy
Prisoner?
Mark
Latham
Nothing Bush Said Has Changed Our Hopes
Gerry
Adams
I Was Photographed While Tortured, Too
Toni
Solo
Venezuela 2004, Nicaragua's Contra War Reprised
Derek
Seidman
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old
M.
Junaid Alam
Torture is Just the Symptom
Matt
Siegfried
An American Way of War
Dave
Zirin
The Politics of Charles Barkley
Poets'
Basement
Albert, Krieger, St. Clair
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