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June 18, 2002
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
June 17, 2002
Jack McCarthy
Watergate
and All That
Philip Farruggio
A Maximum
Wage Law
Ron Sullivan
Law
and Orders:
The Assault on Trial by Jury
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Taking
on the School
of the Americas
Joan Smith
G.W. Bush:
The Man is Stupid
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
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:
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 March 15, 2002
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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 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
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 18,
2002
Bring Out the
Booster Chair for Jr.
THE INcredible Shrinking President
by Alexander Cockburn
Because it's thirty years since Watergate we've
been treated to plenty of photos of Richard Nixon, mostly at
the moment he was leaving office. I was among those happy to
see him go, but today am sad that for obvious reasons the National
Archive will never be in a position to release Nixon's unvarnished
comments on the man whose father he made chairman of the Republican
National Committee.
How aghast that malign political genius
would have been at the ignoramus occupying the Oval Office once
fragrant with Dick's curses. What a falling off is there! From
malediction to malapropism. I'm sure W's speech is less burdened
by obscenity than that of the Navy vet and seasoned poker player,
but this is the purity of the born-again imbecile. W. has the
vocabulary of a 12-year old, though most 12-year olds have an
infinitely stronger grasp of world affairs.
Our spaniel press makes herculean efforts
to pass over the fact in silence, but the fact is that George
W. Bush is the laughing stock of the world, by dint of the obvious
fact that his maximum level of competence was that of greeter
at the ball park in Arlington, which as David Vest recently remarked on this site, is the only
real job he ever had before he met Ken Lay.
Nixon had policies, strategies. Bush
has notes (often contradictory) from his staff, which he bears
no sign of comprehending for longer than the brief moments in
which he lurches his way through them in some public forum.
Take the Middle East. Don't even go back
to last year. Just take the last few weeks, in which Bush told
Mubarak of his hopes for a Palestinian state, hopes that promptly
vanished with the arrival of his next visitor, Ariel Sharon.
How long can Secretary of State Colin Powell endure the humiliation
of being dispatched on one ludicrous mission after another, even
as press secretary Ari Fleischer, (a man who makes Nixon's Ron
Ziegler look like George Washington) tells the press that Powell's
statements are irrelevant as expressions of presidential policy.
Edward Said puts it well in a
recent column: "To say that he and his disheveled administration
'want' anything is to dignify a series of spurts, fits, starts,
retractions, denunciations, totally contradictory statements,
sterile missions by various officials of his administration,
and about-faces, with the status of an over-all desire, which
of course doesn't exist. Incoherent, except when it comes to
the pressures and agendas of the Israeli lobby and the Christian
Right whose spiritual head he now is, Bush's policy consists
in reality of calls for Arafat to end terrorism, and (when he
wants to placate the Arabs) for someone somewhere somehow to
produce a Palestinian state and a big conference, and finally,
for Israel to go on getting full and unconditional US support
including most probably ending Arafat's career. Beyond that,
US policy waits to be formulated, by someone, somewhere, somehow."
Iraq? It was the acme of the axis of
evil. Then it wasn't, because the Joint Chiefs said it would
be tough to invade the place. Now we've got something billed
as a new preemptive policy. What's new about it? Throughout the
cold war America's strategic policy never set aside the possibility
of a preemptive first strike against the foe. We're now told
that the CIA (yes, the same agency that has just made the worst
screw-up in its history) should try to kill Saddam, on the grounds
that if he makes any move to avoid being killed by the CIA, that
can be construed as aggression, meriting assassination.
Never mind that the US has been trying
to kill Saddam since 1991, tried to mount coups against through
the first half of the 1990s, concluded that it was impossible
and that the best thing to do was throw some money around to
groups like the Iraqi National Accord. Never mind all that. Here
we are in the wake of a terrorist attack on the US embassy in
Karachi that killed eleven (another major intelligence failure,
right?) and the Bush regime (until it decided to hang Ashcroft
out to dry) tries to change the subject with mighty boasts about
the capture of a Puerto Rican gangbanger who took an H-bomb blueprint
off the internet, and with a "new" finding for the
CIA to finish off Saddam.
How about national security? Should Bush
have fired the FBI's and the CIA's director long since, along
with that lunatic Clarke, a White House terror commissar under
both Clinton and Bush. Of course he should. Should he have appointed
a commission to reorganize America's intelligence agencies? Of
course. But here we are in June of 2002 and all we have is a
proposal to create a new alphabet soup of agencies now bracing
to spend the next decade battling over bureaucratic and budgetary.
Last time Bush was in Europe, a German
newspaper ran a headline on its front page announcing Bush's
bold new vision. Then it left the rest of the page blank. The
Europeans are a snotty, self-regarding bunch, but this time they're
on the money. The leader of the World, free and unfree, simply
isn't up to par. He's not qualified for the job. He never was.
And that means big trouble ahead for the World, Free and Unfree.
At least Nixon knew what he was doing, which is why the world
was frightened by him. When it's not laughing at him the world
is frightened of George W. Bush because it knows he hasn't a
clue. That's truly terrifying.
Today's
Features
David Vest
Raise the
White Flag in Terror War?
Ben White
Is It Possible
to "Understand" the Rise in "Anti-Semitism"?
Edward Said
Palestinian
Elections Now
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