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June 14, 2002
Steve Perry
How the Bush Adminstration Buried
Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
Resources:
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Whiteout:
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by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
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
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The
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Al Gore:
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June 14,
2002
American Journal
The Terrorism
of Everyday Life
by Alexander Cockburn
Gangbangers with dirty bombs! Now we're talking.
The big news about the latest suspected terror bomber is not
that he now calls himself Al Muhajir but that he was formerly
Jose Padilla, born a Puerto Rican, raised in Chicago. Padilla
became a son of militant Islam in the slammer, the same way thousands
of other young denizens in our Gulag do.
In the normal order of business suspected
gangbangers don't have much purchase on the Bill of Rights. Their
rights of assembly, protections against unreasonable searches
and seizures, were curtailed long since. Padilla's current status
could foreshadow a trend. Pending challenge in the courts, he's
classed as an "enemy combatant", locked up in a navy
brig in Charleston, S.C. with no rights at all.
Tuesday June 11, all the way from Moscow,
Attorney General Ashcroft fostered the impression that that Padilla/Muhajir
had been foiled pretty much in the act of planting radioactive
material taped to TNT in the basement of the Sears Building,
or the Commodities Exchange or the Field Museum or some kindred
monument of Chicago. "U.S.: 'Dirty Bomb' Plot Foiled"
exulted USA Today.
Wednesday brought us a modified climb-down.
"Threat of 'dirty bomb' softened" muttered USA Today's
main head. It turned out Muhajir had ten grand in cash and maybe
big dreams but nothing in the way of radioactive dirt or even
TNT. Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the press
"I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some fairly
loose talk." He should know. Nameless administration officials
dumped on Ashcroft for grandstanding.
But at least we're now sensitized to
the "dirty bomb" menace. USA Today (which has the advantage
of being a Friedman-free zone) ran an exciting graphic put together
by the Federation of American Scientists displaying the long
term effects of ten pounds of TNT wrapped around a "pea-size"
piece of cesium 137 from a medical gauge being exploded at the
National Gallery of Art.
Anyone standing within three blocks downwind
from the Gallery would stand a one-in-a thousand chance of getting
cancer, An easterly breeze would put the Capitol within this
radius.
We should be worried about this? I'd
say it comes pretty low on the list of Major Concerns. Now suppose
Al Qaeda was to plan something really nasty like shipping spent
nuclear fuels by rail from every quarter of the United States
to a fissured mountain in Nevada not that far from one of America's
prime tourist destinations?
That's the Bush plan of course. The House
has voted Aye. It now awaits approval by the US Senate. You can
check out your own proximity to the contemplated nuclear shipping
routes by going to www.mapscience.org,
put together by a public interest group.
Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City, Mo.,
and Salt Lake City will become hubs for the nuclear fuel shipments.
Take Illinois. 1,063 schools will be within one mile of rail,
barge and highway routes proposed by the Department of Energy.
The White House is 1.1 miles from Union Station, through which
shipments are expected to pass on the journey to Yucca Mountain.
But the scheduled Yucca Mountain nuclear
dump is part of terror-as-normalcy, part of our domestic furniture.
What a gift to the powers-that-be the
War on Terror is turning out to be as a subject-changer. Right
now, across the United States from New York state to Oregon and
Washington the final cut-offs for people on welfare are looming
up. The guillotine blade ratcheted into position by Clinton's
welfare reform of 1996 is plummeting down.
Take Oregon. It has a terrible recession,
the worst unemployment rate in the country and the largest deficit
in the state's history. Back in 1979, according to the Oregon
Center for Public Policy, 39 per cent of poor Oregonians were
getting public assistance. These days the percentage is below
10 per cent.
Does that mean that the previously destitute
are now in regular jobs? No. It just means you have to be a lot
poorer to get any sort of handout. It means the usual story:
exhausted mothers scrabbling for petty cash, doing occasional
starvation-wage work. Over the first 14 months of the current
recession eight Oregon counties had their combined unemployment
grow by 92 per cent. At the same time the number of welfare recipients
went down by 16 per cent.
This is the Terrorism of Everyday Life,
at the most elemental level, aimed at the weakest in our midst:
no money for food, for shelter, for the kids, and a President
who actually wants to stiffen the work requirements. Thus do
we nourish the next generation of Enemy Combatants on the home
front.
Dershowitz
Says Baby Killing
Plan Legitimate But Flawed
Nathan Lewin, a bigtime attorney in Washington
DC, often tipped for a federal judgeship and legal advisor to
several Orthodox organizations, told Forward, as reported there
on June 7, 2002, that the families of suicide bombers should
be executed, arguing that such a policy would offer the necessary
deterrent against suicide attacks. Lewin magnanimously stipulates
that family members would be spared if they immediately condemned
the bombing and refused financial compensation for the loss of
their relative.
According to the Forward's reporter,
Alan Dershowitz and Abraham Foxman, national director of the
Anti-Defamation League, argued that Lewin's proposal represented
a legitimate attempt to forge a policy for stopping terrorism.
Foxman declined to take a stand on the
actual proposal, citing his policy of deferring to Jerusalem
on Israeli security issues. Exhibiting his habitual moral refinement,
Dershowitz also an advocate of judge-sanctioned torture
here in the US --argued that the same level of deterrence could
be achieved by leveling the villages of suicide bombers after
the residents had been given a chance to evacuate.
Lewin argues that the biblical injunction
to destroy the ancient tribe of Amalek serves as a precedent
in Judaism for taking measures that are "ordinarily unacceptable"
in the face of a mortal threat.
Those who care to consult the first book
of Samuel will find the Amalekite precedent vividly described.
First the divine injunction: "Thus saith the LORD of hosts,
Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have,
and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling,
ox and sheep, camel and ass"
King Saul hastens to obey. "And
Saul smote the Amalekites from Havilah until thou comest to Shur,
that is over against Egypt. And he took Agag the king of the
Amalekites alive, and utterly destroyed all the people with the
edge of the sword. But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the
best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and
the lambs."
Even though the animals were scheduled
for sacrifice to Him, God is furious at the breach of orders
and prompts the prophet Samuel to berate Saul, which he duly
does: "To obey is better than sacrifice, and to hearken
than the fat of rams. For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,
and stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry."
"Then said Samuel, Bring ye hither
to me Agag the king of the Amalekites. And Agag came unto him
delicately. And Agag said, Surely the bitterness of death is
past. And Samuel said, As the sword hath made women childless,
so shall thy mother be childless among women. And Samuel hewed
Agag in pieces before the Lord in Gilgal."
Now that's what I call getting back to
fundamentals!
Today's
Features
Steve Perry
How the Bush Adminstration Buried
Coleen Rowley
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