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Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by Kathy Kelly Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories July 29, 2005 P. Sainath The Class War in Gurgaon Niranjan Ramakrishnan How the West Was Lost: CAFTA and the Disassembling of America Dave Lindorff Marvelous Marvin Bush J.L. Chestnut, Jr. America's Racist Inventory: Oppression Breeds Violence Pat Williams Giving Away the Last Best Place Norman Solomon In Praise of Kevin Benderman: a Moral Leader of the Nation Goes to Prison Sen. Russ Feingold The Bad News About the Energy Bill Cockburn / St. Clair Who's the Real Martyr? Judy Miller or Jim DeFede?     July 28, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Departing Iraq William S. Lind The Duke of Alba and George W. Bush Gilad Atzmon Blair the Camera Man Joshua Frank Passing CAFTA: Blame the Democrats Lila Rajiva Vision Mumbai Submerged Amina Mire Pigmentation and Empire: the Emerging Skin-Whitening Industry Website of the Day Gateway to Underground News   July 27, 2005 Roger Morris The Source Beyond Rove: Condoleezza Rice at the Center of the Plame Scandal Gary Leupp Is Iran Being Set Up? Paul Craig Roberts US Falling Behind Across the Board Jackie Corr Class War on the Ruby River: the Billionaire with His Foot in His Mouth Mike Whitney The Coming End of the Housing Bubble Dave Zirin Why Lance Armstrong Must Break with Bush Christopher Bradley Why I Have Trouble Reading the News Norman Solomon Thomas Friedman, Liberal Sadist? Website of the Day Stormin' Norman     July 26, 2005 Suren Pillay The Enemy Within: When the "Other" is One of "Us" JoAnn Wypijewski Fission and Fizzle in Chicago: SEIU and Teamsters Quit the AFL Patrick Cockburn Iraq: the Unwinnable War David Anderson When the Greatest Outrage is the Lack of Outrage: NYC's Subway Searches Joshua Frank Hillary Clinton: Outflanking Bush from the Right Lenni Brenner Biography as Wish-Fulfillment: Jefferson, Hitchens and Atheism David Swanson Nuking Native Land   July 25, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts China-Mart Takes Over M. Shahid Alam Terrorism: America Defines Its Targets Uri Avnery March of the Orange Shirts Stan Cox Kreationism in Kansas Norman Solomon "Wagging the Puppy" Ramzy Baroud London Bombings: Barbaric, But Not Unexpected Mickey Z. No Gun Ri: 55 Years Later Website of the Day The Birth of a Hummingbird in 15 Images   July 23 / 24, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Islamo-Anarchs or Islamo-Fascists? Tariq Ali The War Comes Home Robert Fisk Something Happened Dave Lindorff Return of the Academic Witch Hunts Ricardo Alarcón Kidnapping in Miami: the UN, the US and the Cuban 5 Col. Dan Smith Living in a Twilight Zone: Troop Strength, Recruitment and the Draft Brian Cloughley The Pentagon's China Hypocrisy Kevin Zeese Growing Republican Opposition to Iraq War Bill Quigley Harrowing Hours in Haiti Fred Gardner The Reverberations of Raich Rep. Ron Paul The Patriot Act is a Threat to Liberty Joshua Frank Framing Abortion: Gonadal Politics and the Democrats Shivali Tukdeo Project Mumbai Makeover: Casualties of Development Gilad Atzmon Blair's "Evil Ideology" James Petras Baghdad: Barbarism and Civilization (a Fiction) Ben Tripp When Being American Was Fun Poets' Basement Krieger, Louise, Buknatski, Albert and Engel Website of the Weekend Remember the West Memphis 3 July 22, 2005 Heather Gray Home Grown Axis of Evil: Corp. Agribusiness, the Occupation of Iraq and the Dred Scott Decision David Domke The American Press and Credibility Lance Selfa Battle of the Insiders: No Heroes in the Plame Leak Scandal JoAnn Wypijewski Is This Really an "Insurgency" to Shake Up the Labor Movement?   July 21, 2005 Rose Ann DeMoro The Top 10 Problems with the "Crisis" in the Labor Movement William Blum London: Another Casualty in the War on Terror J.L. Chestnut, Jr. Whites Need to Learn Something: Dixie is Everywhere Christopher Brauchli Strange Affairs: Liberals and Alberto Gonzales Joshua Frank Plame Blame Game: the 5 Ws Brian Concannon, Jr. Haiti's Elections: Time for a Reality Check Patrick Cockburn The True, Terrible State of Iraq and the Link to London Website of the Day Who Blew Up the Murrah Building?     July 20, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Judge Roberts: Business as Usual Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz Red Christmas Ray McGovern Did Dick Finger Valerie?: the Hand of Cheney Chris Floyd Judge Dread: John Roberts and the "Enemy Combatants" Uri Avnery "Silence is Filth" Dave Lindorff Westmoreland's Body Count Goes Up by One Norman Solomon Gen. Westmoreland's Death Wish Bill Quigley Travels in Haiti with a Wanted Priest       July 19, 2005 Tariq Ali An Isolated Regime John Ross Jihad Meets G-8 Davey D. More Clear Channel Censorship: "Don't F--K Around with Tha Police" Greg Weiher Muzzling Saddam: the Old Bait-and-Switch in Iraqi Jurisprudence Brian McKinlay An "Arse Licker" Goes to Washington: John Howard's Grand Tour Norman Solomon Nukes for India; Threats for Iran Dave Lindorff Get Back to Where We Once Belonged Bill Christison Bush's Itinerary: First Stop Syria, Next Stop Iran Joshua Frank Laura's Justice?: Meet Edith Brown Clement   July 18, 2005 Joshua Frank An Interview with Ward Churchill M. Shahid Alam A Muslim Problem: Did Thomas Friedman Flunk History? Jude Wanniski Memo to Patrick Fitzgerald Ron Jacobs A Weekend to Stop the War Mike Whitney The Straight Line Between Falluja and King's Cross Station William MacDougall From "Bring It On" to "London Can Take It" Seth Sandronsky Temporary Recovery: New Frontiers in Labor Flexibility Richard Lichtman The Consolations of George Lakoff Paul Craig Roberts Can Congressional Republicans End Bush's Wars? Website of the Weekend Novels of the Neo-Cons   July 15 / 17, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Don't You Dare Call It Treason Jeffrey St. Clair Sticky Fingers: the Making of Halliburton Paul Craig Roberts Economic Treason Harry Browne "What They Do to Us, They Will Do to You": Shell Oil in Mayo, Ireland Uri Davis, Ilan Pappe and Tamar Yaron A Warning from Israel Andrew Rubin End of the Enlightenment: an Open Letter to Stephen Plaut Patrick Cockburn Iraq's Ghost Battalions J.L. Chestnut, Jr. Changes in Selma: Standing Up to Racism in the South Fred Gardner A Professional Bust Christopher Brauchli An Olympic Feat: How to "Double" Aid with No New Money Chris Floyd The Great Iraq Oil Giveaway Ben Tripp The Dark Incontinent Col. Dan Smith General Abizaid, I'm Glad You Asked Jason Leopold What Did Rove Say and When Did He Say It? Jack Random Miller Time Norman Solomon War and Venture Capitalism George Ochenski Liberate Montana's Rivers: Come One, Come All! Website of the Weekend Vote for CounterPuncher David Vest     July 14, 2005 Jeffrey St. Clair Sticky Fingers: the Making of Halliburton Subcomandante Marcos This is What Will Do and How We Shall Do It: the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona Dave Lindorff No More Moral Relativism: the US is a Terrorist State Joshua Frank Rove Agency: Liberals and the CIA Jude Wanniski Those 8 Black Pages: What's the Real Story on Karl Rove? Dave Zirin Storming the Castle Kevin Zeese Exit Strategy: Within Reach? Robert Jensen War Myths and the Press Reza Fiyouzat A Worldwide Call to Free Akbar Ganji Carol Norris Governor Paranoid: Schwarzenegger Comes Unhinged Website of the Day Nate Osborn: Heroic Human Rights Activist and CounterPuncher   July 13, 2005 Brian Cloughley Cold Blooded Murders in Iraq George Galloway We Can't Separate the London Bombings from the Political Backdrop Carlos Fierro A Supreme Waste of Time Sarah Knopp Hate on the Border Norman Solomon "Isolated Pockets of Problems": the Fake Optimism of Washington's Warriors Mickey Z. Water on the Brain Jim Minick The Right Tree in the Right Place Pat Williams American Indian Education for All Andrew N. Rubin Life Behind the Wall: "We are No Longer Able to See the Sun Set" Website of the Day "London's Burning": the Mikey Mix     July 12, 2005 Laith al-Saud Voices of Resistance: an Interview with Dr. Mohammed al-Obaidi of Iraq's Peoples' Struggle Movement Kara N. Tina "This is How We Do It": Report from the Gleneagles Battlefield William A. Cook The London Bombings: Why Has It Come to This? Jack Bratich 2 Live Cruise: Tom Cruise v. Big Pharma Amina Mire The Problem with Speaking in the Name of Others Dick J. Reavis Lessons from the Christian Jihadists: the Virtues of Burning Crosses and Colored Smoke Kevin Zeese Depleted Uranium: States Take Action to Protect Their Vets Paul Craig Roberts No-Think Nation Website of the Day Coke Gags Indian Artist     July 9 / 11, 2005 Alexander Cockburn After the Bombings Uri Avnery War of the Colors in Israel Sheldon Rampton Blaming Galloway: Rhetoric vs. Reality in London Bill Christison Hiroshima's 60th Anniversary and Nukes in Iran: an Opportunity or Just More Hand-wringing from the Peace Movement? Robert Fisk Blair's Alliance with Bush Bombed Stephen Winspear Collateral Damage in London? Saul Landau Mission Accomplished: Iraq is Broken Behrooz Ghamari Thomas Friedman's Muslim Problem Karl Beitel False Promises and Real Debt Relief Brian Concannon, Jr. Throwing Gasoline on Haiti's Fires Fred Gardner Sentencing Season John Whitlow And What Does the Market Say? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The London Blasts: Who's Being Transformed, Them or Us? Lila Rajiva Witches and Bastards Laura Carlsen CAFTA: Deepening the Inequities Jackie Corr Ted Turner and Jiminy Cricket Dave Lindorff "My Brother Went Over There Gung Ho; Now He's Just Bitter" N. D. Jayaprakash Why the CIA Tried to Kill Chou En Lai at the Bandung Conference Seth Sandronsky Meet the "Truth Tour": Rightwing Radio Hosts Go to Iraq Norman Madarasz The Choking of Brazil's Worker Party Ben Tripp The Inevitability of George W. Bush Poets' Basement Louise, Albert, Landau, Davies and Engel Website of the Weekend The Mother of All Enemies Lists     July 8, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Blowback Hits Britain: Londoners Pay Heavy Price for Blair's Deception Tariq Ali The London Bombings: Why They Happened Monica Benderman One Soldier's Fight to Legalize Morality Rick Jahnkow Beyond Opt-Out: the Counter-Recruitment Movement Christopher Brauchli Dear Vet: If You Want to Eat While You Recuperate, You Gotta Pay Extra Kim Peterson Bombs in the Underground: Terror Begats Terror Joshua Frank Leakers and Liars: Inching Toward Indictments? Norman Solomon Messages from the Carnage Website of the Day An Interview with Ray McGovern   July 7, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr John Walsh More Hawkish Than Bush: Dems in Full Battle Cry Mike Marqusee Message from London Gilad Atzmon London's Burning Nicole Colson Showdown at the Supreme Court Jack Random Judith Miller, Anti-Hero Norman Solomon Judith Miller, Drum Majorette for War Len Colodny Is Bob Woodward Still Protecting Al Haig? Cockburn / St. Clair Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr                                                             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

July 29, 2005 Moral Summersaults at the Miami Herald and NYT Who's the Real Martyr: Judy Miller or Jim DeFede? By ALEXANDER COCKBURN and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR "We know no spectacle so ridiculous as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality." So wrote Lord Macaulay back in 1830. What would Macaulay have written about the summary firing of Miami Herald columnist Jim DeFede on Thursday? Why was DeFede fired? On Thursday the columnist was called on the phone by a former Miami city commissioner called Arthur Teele Jr. DeFede had known him for many years. Teele has just been indicted on federal mail fraud and money laundering charges, and a male prostitute was claiming that Teele had enjoyed his sexual services and used cocaine with him. As DeFede listened to the distraught Teele, he says he realized that the man was in a very bad way. "The idea that he might be thinking suicide was in my mind. I wanted to get what he was saying down ­ to preserve what he was saying ­ so I pushed the record button." DeFede, at home, soon got a second call from Teele, who told him he was leaving a package for him at the Herald's security desk. Minutes later DeFede got a call from the Herald telling him that Teele had shot himself fatally in the head in the lobby of The Herald. "I'm stunned", DeFede said later. "I'm physically shaking and my first reaction looking down at the tape is, this is basically Teele's suicide note. These are his final words about the torture that his life has been through, all this up and down. This is his last words; what do I do with it." In other words DeFede has an incredible scoop, the sort of break reporters and editors dream about, a broken man's last testament, Pulitzer Prize material. What happens? DeFede gets fired. First, a Miami Herald reporter interviews DeFede, who tells him about the tape. DeFede is immediately transferred to the Herald's publisher, Jesus Diaz Jr, and the paper's general counsel, Robert Beatty. He informs them about the tape and asks whether he can use it, since he's recorded the conversation without Teele's permission. Florida is one of a handful of states with a law banning recording without permission. DeFede says the executives asked him to transcribe the tape before bringing it to the office (presumably hoping to cover their own asses). They also say that there may be some legal exposure for the illegal recording, but the paper will stand behind him. DeFede does the transcription, goes to the office and starts to write his column. The paper uses his transcript in their news story. Two hours later, around 10.30pm, DeFede is summoned to the publisher's office and fired. Diaz holds a press conference and mumbles some barely comprehensible claptrap to the effect that "we never said that this was not an issue, that this would be okay. So there was no change." The Herald's executive editor, Tom Fiedler, says "We expect our people to act in a highly ethical way, and Jim admitted that he had crossed that line, and I didn't really see an alternative. If we have that expectation and someone fails to abide by it, knowingly fails to abide by it, regardless of that person's talent, it means they can longer be a part of The Herald." As the final pinnacle of absurdity, DeFede's bosses concede that they weren't sure whether DeFede had violated the law or not, since the ban does not apply to business conversations. Fiedler says this didn't matter, since DeFede had violated a basic tenet of Herald policy. The suspicion is that Fiedler was obeying orders from high-ups in Knight-Ridder, the corporation that owns The Herald. Also, DeFede had trodden on a lot of political toes in Miami. We've certainly traveled a long way from The Front Page, though Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur would have had a lot of fun with the Herald's Pecksniffian executives. It's hard to decide where to dip one's spoon into this stew of absurdity and bad faith, starting with the obvious point that to achieve any sort of moral consistency The Herald should never have published any portion of the infamous transcript. We can imagine maybe a pro forma rap on the knuckles for DeFede, following by a hearty clap on the back and a bonus. That's the way Hearst or Pulitzer would have done it and they would have been right. For the executives of the Miami Herald to talk about high moral tone is as ridiculous as the New York Times trying to sell Judy Miller as the First Amendment's Joan of Arc. Back in the 1980s, the paper's publishers broke under commercial and political pressure from the city's ultra-right and reversed their editorial policies overnight. Ever since the paper has been the serf of the right-wing Cuban exile bloc in Miami, raising editorial cheers for every kind of right-wing villainy in Latin America, including the ongoing campaign to overthrow the Chavez government in Venezuela. All this in a bid to bolster advertising revenues and circulation. In one area alone the Knight Ridder executives have exhibited consistency: stabbing their reporters in the back. After intense and profitable promotion of Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series in the San Jose Mercury News on the CIA-contra-cocaine connection, Knight Ridder (which owns the Mercury News) crumbled under pressure and destroyed Webb by firing him. There wasn't a word in any of Webb's stories that ever needed to be retracted. In fact the only point of vulnerability was the over-the-top promotional material deployed by the Mercury News' marketing department. This ludicrous firing of DeFede came about because the newspaper industry is in a panic about its low standing with the public. On one poll, about half the country doesn't believe a word it reads in the papers, reasonably so. But the credibility of the press is not in the basement because reporters like DeFede record the last desperate words of a man about to blow his brains out. This brings us back to The New York Times and Judy Miller. On the one hand we have DeFede losing his job because he forthrightly admitted he'd used a recorder to get the exact quotes. It would have been no big deal for him to have said that he'd just scribbled down what Teele was saying. And there's no question of violated privilege because Teele is dead. In fact the tape places his death in a human context. On the other hand we have Miller, a top saleslady for a terrible war, whose stories were mined with anonymous sources selling demonstrable falsehoods. Miller has never been publicly called to account by her own paper for selling fictions contrived by her political co-conspirators who had a political and financial interest in selling a war, in which a country is being destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed. It's clear that within the New York Times there are reporters who are not comfortable with their paper's beatification of Miller. Yesterday, July 28, there was an astonishing story in The Times by Doug Jehl, a good reporter. After fifteen paragraphs about the Rove-Plame affair and what various reporters, notably Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, had learned from their sources, Jehl suddenly ushered on Judith Miller, raising one of the most important, though mostly unasked questions about her role in the Plame affair. Miller currently sits in the Alexandria federal detention center for refusing to disclose an anonymous source to the prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald. She and her editor Bill Keller and Times lawyer Floyd Abrams hold up the banner of the First Amendment and say that Miller had every right to refuse to answer Fitzgerald because she is defending the inviolability of the source/reporter relationship. But was Miller actually working as a reporter in the Plame case? Here are the explosive paragraphs of Jehl's story of July 28: "Ms. Miller never wrote a story about the matter [i.e., the outing of Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA employee]. During that period Ms Miller was working primarily from the Washington bureau of The Times, reporting to Jill Abramson, who was the Washington bureau chief at the time, and was assigned to report for an article published July 20, 2003, about Iraq and the hunt for unconventional weapons, according to Ms Abramson, who is now managing editor of The Times. "In e-mail messages this week, Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, and George Freeman, an assistant general counsel at the newspaper, declined to address written questions [from Jehl] about whether Ms Miller was assigned to report about Mr. Wilson's trip, whether she tried to write a story about it, or whether she ever told editors or colleagues at the newspaper that she had obtained information about the role played by Ms Wilson [i.e. Valerie Plame]." We can easily understand why Keller didn't answer these pointed questions from one of his own star reporters. If the answer is No to Jehl's questions, then, on the most charitable construction, Miller was simply gossiping. On a less charitable but more likely construction, she was working as a political co-conspirator in the White House campaign to discredit Joe Wilson, party of the daisy chain that included Bolton in the State Department, probably Miller's favored source Chalabi, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby and ultimately Robert Novak. Either way, it gets hard to sell Miller as a martyr to the First Amendment. Despite the trumpeting of their own high ethical standards both The Times and The Herald have broken trust with their readers. The Times splashed one Miller fantasy after another on its front page, month after month. The Herald openly announces that it has a moral double standard. It blazons a transcript and then fires the man who switched on the recorder and got the real story. Then it preens in its ethical purity. This is a way to win respect?