Today's Stories

September 13 / 14, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Panic!

Wajahat Ali
Playing with the Constitution

Robert Fantina
Cheney Scales New Heights of Hypocrisy

Marcus Rediker
Notes on a Visit to the Favelas of Medellín, Colombia

Richard Neville
The Baby Killers

Ed Gaffney
Breaking the Siege of Gaza

Carla Blank
Neglecting a Grand Old Lady

P. Sainath
The Almighty and the U.S. Elections

Lee Sustar
Working Harder; Falling Further Behind

Joshua Frank
Liberalism and Its Bounds

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Guantanamoized Age

Dennis Loo
Shock and Awe Comes Home to Roost

Zach Zill
Squeezed Out in New York City

Omar Barghouti
So You Think You Can Dance? Israeli Profiling of African-American Dancers

Bill Quigley
Social Justice Quiz, 2008

Andy Worthington
Bush's Bitter Legacy

Stephen Dunifer
Free Radio: Liberating the Commons

Seth Sandronsky
Bailing Out Big Auto

David Yearsley
Portabella's Bach: Grim, Trite and Incredibly Boring

Patrick B. Barr
Obama's Punchless Campaign

Rannie Amiri
Tasting Ramadan

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Flight Not Taken

Richard Rhames
What, Me Reason?

Poets' Basement
Deer Cloud and Buknatski

September 12, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
The Next Cuban Missile Crisis?

Michael Hudson
More Dangerous Than the A-Bomb? The Chicago School's Record of Infamy

Lloyd Miller
Palin and Alaskan Native and Tribal Rights: a Dismal Record

Steve Breyman
Georgia in NATO?

Maria Rivera
Cuba After Gustav and Ike: an Eyewitness Account

Jonathan Cook
Israel and the Dark Arts

Ayesha Ijaz Khan
U.S. Designs on Pakistan

M. Shahid Alam
The Mendacity of Missed Opportunities

Robert Weissman
Executive Pay and the "Market Economy"

Tanya Golash-Boza / David Brunsma
Immigration Raids Must Be Stopped

Website of the Day
Know Your Rights

September 11, 2008

Noam Chomsky
Towards a Second Cold War?

Sharon Smith
Afghanistan: You Call This a Good War?

Ron Jacobs
Palinomics: She Ain't No Working Class Hero

Marjorie Cohn
God, Guns and Oil: A Palin Theocracy?

Mike Whitney
Cheney in the Caucasus

Jeffery R. Webber
Bolivia: a Coup in the Making?

Paul Cantor
The Other 9/11

Peter Morici
The Surging Trade Deficit

Ray McGovern
Iran's Road Less Traveled to Nukes

Linn Washington, Jr.
Screening Mumia: The Suppression of Dissent in America

Website of the Day
Palin (Michael) for President!

September 10, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
A Temporary Respite from Permanent Decline

Conn Hallinan
The Return of U.S. Death Squads

Ralph Nader
Who Needs Regulations When You've Got a Golden Parachute?

Peter Morici
Can the Bailout Work?

Joanne Mariner
The Horrendous Case of Aafia Siddiqui

Laura Tate Kagel /
Jen Marlowe
The Pending Execution of Troy Davis: a Case for Clemency

Chuck Spinney
Incestuous Amplification and the Madness of King George

Dave Lindorff
Lazy Thinking and Prejudice

Scott Campbell
Where Now for Oaxaca's Social Movement?

Paul Farmer
Haiti and the Hurricanes

Anne Kilkenny
Letters from Wasilla: the Sarah Palin I Know

Website of the Day
Democrats and Zombies

September 9, 2008

Michael Colby
The Obama Poll Drop

Chellis Glendinning
Retorno a 1968: From Berkeley to Mexico City

Vijay Prashad
Losing Game

Jeffery R. Webber/
George Ciccariello-Maher
Venezuela From Below

David Michael Green
Country Last

Brian J. Foley
The New Face of Republican Power

John Ross
Mexican Flag Wrap

Pierre M. Sprey /
Winslow T. Wheeler
Joint Strike Fighter: Another Defense Acquisition Disaster

Nicole Colson
Sami Al-Arian's Long Road to Freedom

Marc Gardner
California's Anti-Homosexual Laws are Alive and Unwell

William S. Lind
The Baltic States and Russia: Toy Armies or Accomodation?

Website of the Day
All Hope Rests with Piper Palin

September 8, 2008

Mike Whitney
An Interview with Michael Hudson on the Worsening Debt Crisis

Tariq Ali
The Godfather as President

Pam Martens
The Man Who Vetted Palin

Bill Quigley
The Weary Road Home: Displaced Poor Continue to Return to New Orleans

Malini Johar Schueller /
Ed White
Not About Me: Obamamania, Racial Porn-fest and Palinama

Robert Jensen
Pop Music and 9/11

Uri Avnery
Lonely Rider

Win McCormack
Palin Family Values

Howard Lisnoff
How Far From a Police State?

Maria C. Khoury
Taybeh Oktoberfest in Palestine

Website of the Day
Scaring Students from Voting in Virginia

September 6 / 7, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Sarah Palin and the Good Book

Jeffrey St. Clair
That Dam Senator: A River Ran Through Him

Linn Washington, Jr.
The GOP Excluded Black-Owned Businesses from Contracts at St. Paul Convention

Patrick Cockburn
Did Bush Spies Monitor Iraqi Allies?

Gary Leupp
The September 3 Attack on Pakistan: a Precursor to More War Crimes?

Nancy Kurshan
CHI-town Lowdown: Memories of 1968

William Blum
Has Obama Already Lost?

Michael Winship
The St. Paul Police vs. the Independent Media

Fred Gardner
Joe Biden, Drug Warrior

Nikolas Kozloff
Sarah Palin and the Wal-Mart Moms: the Cultural Packaging of VP Candidates

Wajahat Ali
The Cryptkeeper and His Pitbull: the Past and Future of the GOP

Robert Fantina
Change Agents?

Karyn Strickler
Palin by Comparison: Sarah and the Hillary Voters

David Yearsley
What Their Fanfares Told Us About the Candidates

Richard Rhames
Bad Campaign Moon Rising

James L. Secor
Bandwagon Politics

Missy Beattie
Missy for Vice POTUS

Eric Patton
Baseless in Obamaland

Ben Terrall
Haiti and the Washington Consensus

Thom Rutledge
Mr. Magoo and the Kind Stranger: a Serious Political Problem

Dan Bacher
Arnold and the Manufactured Drought

David Macaray
Is Union Democracy at Risk?

Jane Stillwater
The Admiral's Child: a Psychological Reason for McCain's Flip Flops

Grady Harper
Should Hunting Really be High on Our Priority List?

Poets' Basement
Wolff, Payne and Holt

Website of the Weekend
We'll See Your Sarah Palin and Raise You With Maria McKee

September 5, 2008

Elizabeth Walters
Old Fears, New Worries in Louisiana

Bill Quigley
Gustav's Path of Destruction

Alan Farago
Nothing Means Anything: The Fantasy of John and Sarah

Dave Lindorff
The Things They Left Behind (Including McCain's First Wife)

Ira Glunts
A Lesson Before Lying: How Republicans Solved Sarah Palin's Jewish Problem

Peter Morici
The Big Slump

Deepak Tripathi
Politics, Morality and the GOP: John McCain as John Major?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Energy of a Hurricane

Michael Donnelly
Change. God. POW.: a Summary of McCain's Big Speech

Martha Rosenberg
Free to Good Home, SUVs

Website of the Day
Sarah Palin's Air War: On Wolves and Bears

September 4, 2008

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Real McCain

Paul Craig Roberts
Who is Wrecking America?

Ron Jacobs
The Perishing Republicans, the RNC 9 and the Twin Cities Cops

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Soft Surge

Andy Worthington
Rendered to Egypt for Torture

Osama Dawoud
How I Lost My Fulbright Scholarship

Stephen Lendman
Katrina Redux: the Militarization of New Orleans

Fidel Castro
Hurricane as Nuclear Strike

Website of the Day
Is McCain Palin's Bitch?

September 3, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Fake U.S. Victory in Iraq

Sen. Mike Gravel
Good Luck, Sarah!

Vijay Prashad
The Indian Left and the Indo-US Nuclear Deal

Nikolas Kozloff
Palin, Hunting and the American Psyche

Ralph Nader
Repeal Taft-Hartley

Howard Lisnoff
Forty Years in the Streets (And They're Still Beating Up Journalists)

Steve Early / Cal Winslow
Can SEIU Members Exorcize the Purple Shades of Jackie Presser?

Shepherd Bliss
A Field Report From Slow Food Nation

Bill Quigley
Living in the Car After Gustav

Website of the Day
Growing Up Okie: an Interview with Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

September 2, 2008

Marjorie Cohn
Raiding Democracy in St. Paul

Jonathan Cook
Palestinian Village Faces Army Reign of Terror

Robert Weitzel
Biden and Israel

Corey D. B. Walker
Where Do We Go From Here?

John Ross
The Kidnapping Boom in Mexico

Eric Walberg
Wag the Dog in Georgia

Judith Scherr
No Day in Court for Ronald Dauphin

Richard Morse
Haiti, 2008

B. R. Gowani
What If the Israel Lobby was the African-American Lobby?

Michael Greenberg
Loofah Day in Cleveland

Website of the Day
Thanks for the Memories!

September 1, 2008

Nikolas Kozloff
Making a Killing in Iraq: McCain and the Telecoms

C. G. Estabrook
The War Will Go On

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Will a Russo-American Nuclear War Happen (Soon)?

David Macaray
An Elegy for Labor Day

B. R. Gowani
The Lobby as Juggernaut

Saul Landau
Real Gold Winners

Charles Orloski
Going Down to Hell's Cul-de-Sac

Gloria La Riva
Profit and Disaster in New Orleans

Website of the Day
Springsteen: Factory

August 30 / 31, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Speech; McCain's Palinomy

Bill Quigley
Gustav is Coming

Jeffrey St. Clair
Valley Boy: The Rise and Fall of Richard Pombo

Andy Worthington
Shining a Light on the Dark Prison

Deepak Tripathi
The Race for the White House: Notes From a European Observer

Stanley Howard
A Prisoner's Tale of Abuse

Dave Lindorff
Troopergate in Alaska

Wajahat Ali
Palin on the Prowl: a Cougar for the PUMAs?

Robert Fantina
McCain and Palin

Josh Schlossberg
A Bias for Life: the Role of the Environmentalist

Benjamin Dangl
Beyond Voting

Missy Beattie
Stars, Stripes, War and Shame

Howard Lisnoff
Better Cuba Than Florida?

Suzan Mazur
Rethinking Evolution with Stuart Newman

Rev. Jim Rigby
What Would Jesus Ride to the Conventions?

David Yearsely
Katy Perry Meets Mozart

Serge Quadruppani
Italy's Years of Lead

B.R. Gowani
What If the Israeli Lobby Was the Islamic Lobby?

Richard Rhames
Empty Political Calories

Poets' Basement
Holt, Davies, Corsale and Landau

Website of the Day
Return of the Druids

August 29, 2008

Mike Whitney
How the Chicago Boys Wrecked the Economy

Brian Cloughley
Resurgent Russia

David Ker Thomson
Jacko and Me: Dispatches From Fifty

Joanne Mariner
A UK Window on CIA Abuses

Neve Gordon
The Ordeal of Sahar Vardi, Refusenik

Chris Genovali
Of Whales and Off-Shore Drilling

Ron Jacobs
What's a Godfearing Country to Do?

Michael Donnelly
Honest Abe in Denver?

August 28, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
The Battle of Chicago

Paul Cantor
Who Killed Victor Jara?

Saul Landau /
Farrah Hassen
Axis of Evil Defeats Neocons

Andy Worthington
Clearing Out Guantánamo

Ben Terrall
Return to Port-au-Prince

Leonard Peltier
Message to Obama: Symbolism Alone Will Not Bring Change

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Miasma of Bi-Partisanship

Donna J. Volatile
The Obama Construct

Website of the Day
Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker and Maya Angelou on the Meaning of Obama

August 27, 2008

Anthony DiMaggio
The Myths of Joe Biden

Jordan Flaherty
Three Years After Katrina

Ralph Nader
The Politics of Avoidance

Melissa Checker
Carbon Offsets, More Harm Than Good?

Bob Sommer
Blaming the Sixties

Cynthia McKinney
How the Democrats Helped Bush Hijack the Country

Ali Khan
Pakistan's Flawed Presidency

M. Junaid Levesque-Alam
The Only Good Muslim is the Anti-Muslim

Dave Lindorff
Strip-Search Nation

David Macaray
Labor's Hard Lessons

Website of the Day
Stagnant Income in an Eroding Economy

August 26, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
The Big Questions About Iraq

Michael D. Yates
Obama and the Working Class

Paul Craig Roberts
Is War With Russia on the Agenda?

Andy Worthington
The Guantánamo Suicide Report

Rev. Jesse L. Jackson
Obama's Promised Land?

Huwaida Arraf
Sailing into Gaza

Joseph Grosso
Back to the Future: New York's Housing Crisis

Sheldon Richman
What About the Ossetians?

Binoy Kampmark
Impasse at Singur

Website of the Day
Taser Bait in Denver

August 25, 2008

Patrick Cockburn
US Out of Iraq by "2011"

Bill Quigley
Katrina, the Pain Index

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Outposts Seal Death of Palestinian State

James McEnteer
Death by Paranoia

Uri Avnery
The Devil's Hoof

Will Potter
The State Deparment's Green Scare Wing

Robert Jensen
Technological Fundamentalism

Stephen Lendman
Reinventing the Evil Empire

Wajahat Ali
Biden His Time

Carl Finamore
The Future of Trade Unions in China

Website of the Day
Don't Blow Up the Mountain, Boys

August 23 / 4, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
"Change," "Hope"...Why They Must be Talking About Joe Biden!

Jeffrey St. Clair
Killing Salmon with Paul O'Neill: Power, Profits and the Future of the Columbia River

Patty O'Grady
John McCain in a New Context: Why the Senator is No War Hero

Nicole Colson
Obama and Big Corn

Steve Conn
Obama and the Mining Cartel

Deepak Trapathi
Pakistan in Uncertain Times

Robert Fantina
Once Upon a Time in America: a McCain Administration

Jonathan M. Feldman
Obamanomics: Does the Left Have Anything to Say?

Joshua Frank
Targeting Pelosi (and the War Machine): an Interview with Cindy Sheehan

Osama Qashoo
Sailing to Gaza

Howard Lisnoff
The Long Silence: American Jews and the Palestinians

David Michael Green
Sen. McShame and the Wreckage: John McCain Discovers America

Dave Lindorff
Why Not Let the Republicans Deal With This Mess?

Christopher Brauchli
A Banner Month for Passports

Alan Farago
Who Crippled the Government?

Michael Winship
Cash Register Conventions

Richard Rhames
Vlad the Derailer: Can Putin Save America From Itself?

David Rosen
The Culture Wars Are Over: But Culture Warriors Are Still Terrorizing America

Patrick B. Barr
Don't Try to Tame the Lightning Bolt

Jamie Newlin
Western Turf Wars: the Politics of Public Lands Ranching

Poets' Basement
Glendinning, McEnteer and Bonner

Website of the Weekend
Cafe Reconcile, New Orleans

August 22, 2008

Boris Kagarlitsky
Fallout from the Georgian War

Laura Carlsen
Obama and Latin America: Change or Continuity?

Bob Barr
No War for Georgia

Marwan Bishara
From Russia with Love: Putin Hits Georgia, Bloodies Bush

Peter Morici
Is the Fed Still a Central Bank?

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The Big Heat

Charles Mostoller
The Battle for the Amazon

Sumbul Ali-Karamali
Obama is Not a Muslim: But Would It Be So Terrible If He Were?

Keith Rosenthal
Standing Up to Union-Bashing

John F. Miglio
The Devolution of the Baby Boom Generation

Website of the Day
Fire Sale in the Markets!

August 21, 2008

Allan J. Lichtman
Is Georgia 2008 a Repeat of Hungary 1956?

Dave Lindorff Loserville: How Obama Blew It

Ralph Nader
The Problem with Problem Banks

Joanne Mariner
The Military Commissions, So Far

Wajahat Ali
Descent Into Chaos: an Interview with Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Taliban

Ron Jacobs
Georgia and Historical Farce

Rostam Purzal
The Left and Iran

Anthony Papa
Unlocking the Power of Art to Counter Injustice

Website of the Day
Rocky Mountain Way

August 20, 2008

Michael Neumann
Russia and Georgia: Proportion and Distortion

Ray McGovern
Musharraf Out Like Nixon

Eric Walberg
Georgia's Ossetian Debacle

Fidaa Abed
Blocking a Gazan's Path to San Diego

Daniel Haack
The Pentagon's Most Prolific Pundit

Mike Whitney
Greenback Surges, Euro Shrivels

Website of the Day
Hands Off South Africa's Centre for Civil Society

August 19, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
Are You Ready for Nuclear War?

Deepak Tripathi
A New Age of Torture

Marwan Bishara
The Politics of Evil in the US Elections

Saul Landau
Baseball Diplomacy or Just Baseball?

William S. Lind
Leave Georgia Alone, George

Martha Rosenberg
Whole Foods and Other Food Offenders

James Brittain
The Road to Tyranny in Colombia

Pratyush Chandra
Krugman's Great Illusion

David Macaray
AFSCME's Strike Against the University of California

Website of the Day
McCain Plagiarizing Solzhenitsyn

Weekend Edition
September 13 / 14, 2008

CounterPunch Diary

Panic!

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Democrats, exquisitely sensitized to the footfalls of defeat by the disasters of 2000 and 2004, caught the first menacing chords of impending disaster last weekend and have been panicking ever since.

The hours they had to revel in the apparent success of their Denver convention and Obama’s big speech were pitifully brief. The very next day John McCain picked as his running mate a virtually unknown governor from Alaska and the country has gone Palin-crazy ever since.

Ignoring  Obama’s solemn appeals for unity, America has become joyously divided. Evangelicals, braced by Palin’s Christian faith, have risen spryly from the bed of their indifference to McCain, a man whose relationship to the Holy Spirit is remote. Now their champion is an accredited bible-thumper, in whom the Holy Spirit burns as brightly as  natural gas flares over the Arctic tundra. 

Liberals, particularly women, maddened at the spectacle of attractive Governor Sarah embodying everything they loathe, flood the internet with frantic oaths and seize on every particle of gossip from Alaska suggesting that Palin is a hypocrite, a mismanager, a would-be burner of books, a bad mother and untrue to her man.  Those scoffing only a few short weeks ago at the National Enquirer’s “mere unverified gossip” about John Edward’s affair, now hasten to the supermarkets to snatch up the Enquirer’s latest allegations about Palin and her family.

As the political news circuits began to buzz with news of improved polling numbers for McCain-Palin in the battleground states, Obama’s ascent towards the status of a Sure Bet is  stalled. After the triumphs of Denver the candidate relapsed into the nerveless mode of early August. He had the poor judgment to go on the cable news show of Fox’s Bill O’Reilly and make the extraordinary statement that the so-called Surge in Iraq had “succeeded beyond our wildest dreams”. He calls for 10,000 more troops for Afghanistan. Move over, Sarah Palin! You only want to shoot wolves from helicopters. Real men like Obama want more helicopter gunships to mow down Afghan kids from the air.

At a stroke, with that deadly concession about the success of the surge, Obama handed McCain the opportunity, in their upcoming debates, to congratulate his Democratic opponent for acknowledging McCain’s superior political and military judgment. Simultaneously Obama foolishly threw over the side the reports of journalists on the spot like CounterPunch’s Patrick Cockburn who have been describing how the present lowering of violence in Iraq owes little to the surge in US troops, as opposed to changes in local political conditions. It certainly confirms my view that Obama rarely has the stomach to stand his ground, when challenged from the right with any vigor.

When a candidate trips up, or loses the initiative, his path becomes one endless snare. Obama’s likening of the hypocrisies of the McCain campaign to a pig wearing lipstick was swiftly converted by McCain into a sexist insult against Palin. The Democrats try to fight back by saying McCain and Palin are being unfair, are misrepresenting their views. But then, the next day, the Republicans launch a fresh slur and retain the initiative.

Ominously reminiscent of John Kerry in 2004, defensiveness seeps from a Democratic ticket endlessly trying to set the record straight. Obama’s running mate, Senator Joe Biden,  pays tribute to Hilary Clinton at a campaign rally and says politely that "Quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me." This was instantly offered up on the right wing talk shows as a confession of total inadequacy.  

Day after day McCain’s escorts shielded Palin from any impromptu exchanges with the press, until the eagerly awaited 3-part interviews with ABC’s Charles Gibson began last Thursday. I’ll root for anyone against an uppity, patronizing network interviewer and so I was in Palin’s corner when ABC’s Gibson went after her about the Bush Doctrine, which he made sound as though it was something you learned in school along with the Gettysburg address.  No one knows what the Bush doctrine is, least of all President Bush. He’s spent seven long years trying to define it. Basically the Doctrine says it’s okay for employees or subcontracted agents of the US Government to kidnap people, lock them up in wire or concrete hutches for years at a time, regularly electrocuting them and beating their genitals until they go mad. Small wonder Sarah Palin didn’t want to get too specific.

I don’t think anyone, however charitable, could watch the interviews and conclude that the Alaskan governor is highly qualified to take up the reins of executive power. She’s no Dick Cheney, seasoned in state craft. But I thought at least Palin’s not a waffler. Wrong.  Here she was trimming on issues like choice and man’s supposed contribution to global warming. Next thing you know, she’ll be back-dating Creation to the Miocene and tipping her hat to Al Gore, a creature who in Palin’s previous incarnation, less than three weeks ago (only 3,999 years and 344 days after the Beginning, on her old calendar)  she’d have  been happy to hunt from the air in whatever state-owned helicopters weren’t otherwise engaged in shuttling Piper and the kids to school or home for the weekend.  

In the mid 70s, covering Ronald Reagan’s first presidential bid, I remember formulating complicated, smarty-pants questions on the campaign trail designed to trip up the California governor  and expose him as a tyro in foreign policy. I taxed him at his impromptu press conferences  with recondite queries about the Law of the Sea and side agreements to the latest GATT round. Reagan sailed through on cushions of blather,

The Obama campaign is rattled, and the Republicans heartened. But it’s way too soon to make larger surmises. Presidential elections are settled by the electoral college and not by popular vote, and in the states crucial to a majority in the electoral college Obama is still doing okay. In 2004 Kerry lost such swing states as  Ohio, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Colorado. Today (somewhat depending which polls you read)  Obama is ahead in Ohio, Michigan, New Mexico and New Hampshire. McCain leads in Florida and Virginia.

Obama has a lot more money for campaign advertising  than  McCain, though the campaign ads he’s issuing right now need to get rougher if they’re going to counter McCain’s torrent of lies. Economic conditions are bad and the official rate of unemployment (about half than the actual rate) now above 6 per cent. Last weekend Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson rushed to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the largest nationalization in history, privatizing the profits and nationalizing the losses, sticking the taxpayers with a $300 billion tab. This week it’s been the turn of Lehman to go belly up, with Washington Mutual also in bad trouble. Governor Palin may be weak on the Bush doctrine, but McCain’s grasp of the economy is frailer by far. 

We have the debates ahead and six weeks in which Americans  can recover from the intoxication of their first date with Governor Sarah and ponder whether they really want Republicans in the White House for 12 straight years. Popular though the Palin pick may have been, she’d need truly magical powers to have elicited an immediate Yes on that big question.

McCain NOT crippled upon POW release

Did you catch the previously unknown footage of McCain on Thursday night by a Swedish TV station? It was from March 14, 1973, when McCain was released by the Vietnamese. This was not the tortured cripple of the “returning hero” clips and photos we’ve been seeing. He looks pretty spry, albeit with a slight limp.Here’s the  link to the news coverage on SVT’s “Rapport”
http://svt.se/play?a=1244518

We were sent it from Stockholm by CounterPuncher Horst Schröder who also furnishes a rough translation of the clip. As follows:

[Images of  journalist Erik Eriksson today at his writing desk.] It was Erik Eriksson, foreign correspondent for Swedish Television covering the Vietnam War during the 1960s and 70s who found these images while doing research for his book on his time in Vietnam.

[CLU on determined but rather healthy looking McCain in a group of POWs standing ready for release. Vietnamese speaker [off] calling out the names of the POWs in turn.]

- John Sidney McCain

[found footage: McCain walking briskly and with a slight limp across a square towards an US military officer. He salutes, and shakes hands. US soldiers and officials all around.]

Eriksson: He doesn’t look like he’s a wreck. The image we have been fed was that he had been violently battered and broken when he got home, like a wreck.

[found footage: McCain salutes again, walks briskly off. Cut to another officer. Cut to McCain stepping off a (military?) bus, followed by other  passengers (released POWs?)]

Eriksson: But these here images don’t show this at all.

Newscaster: These images which are shown here for the first time where taken on March 14, 1973, the same day McCain was released after five and a half year as POW in communistic North Vietnam.

[CLU Eriksson]

Eriksson: The image which has been put forward – maybe not by himself, primarily, but by his campaign manager – of course, is totally defined by his position as a presidential candidate.

[Clip from McCain bio RNC video.]]

VO: “A year came Hanoi. Critically injured, with wounds never properly addressed, for the next five and a half years John was tortured and dragged from one filthy prison to another.”

[Found footage. CLU McCain walking past a large group of onlooking soldiers. ]

Newscaster: John McCain was a bomber pilot, and he was shot down during his 23rd mission in North Vietnam, the start of his five and half years as POW.

[McCain campaign video with McCain looking haggard and in sickbay.]

Newscaster: These pictures are from his campaign video. Why, Erik Eriksson wonders,

[Found Footage: MC Cain stepping down an airplane gangway]

does McCain leave Vietnam walking on his own legs, but does walk with crutches later on, like here

[the well known photo shoot McCain and Nixon shaking hands]

…when he, much later, half a year after his release, meets with President Nixon.

[Original Soundtrack McCain campaign propaganda. The RNC biog release, I assume]

Five and a half years later, the war was over and the..[fade over to]

Newscaster: The explanation, according to the former editor in chief of Dagens Nyheter, [largest national morning paper] Hans Bergström, being that McCain in summer 1973 had undergone an operation for a wrongly healed leg fracture. Bergström has written a biography about McCain.

[Still the Nixon shot]

Soundtrack RNC biog :”He chose to spend his life serving the country he loved”

[Still: Present day McCain shaking hands with soldiers]

Newscaster: McCain’s status as a war hero is exploited vigorously by his campaign staff in the fight for the presidency.

[RNC biog again]

“Some called him a warrior, a soldier, naval aviator….”

[CLU Erisson]

Eriksson: The targets they had been assigned, of course, were so-called military targets. But I travelled in this country after these extensive bombing campaigns, when I saw these so-called military targets they bombed. I travelled in these areas where each and every town had been reduced to rubble. USA [historians have been reported ] to have estimated they killed about one thousand civilians per week during these bombing campaigns, a number which came to public knowledge later.

[cut to young Eriksson reporting from Vietnam War]

[Eriksson original war report from totally flattened town. Vietnamese trying to clear the ruins]

“They are clearing the ruins with an enormous frenzy, hoping to, maybe, save the people buried in the ruins. I haven’t any reports yet how many they are, four or five it is rumored, but it might be more. They dug out one lifeless person, a man giving no sign of life, most likely he was dead.”

[End of clip.]

Schroder correctly adds:

I assume such a news coverage would be totally impossible on US TV, especially the critical reflections on the USA’s war in Vietnam, and the juxtaposition of McCain’s heroic bombing raids with the suffering of the bombed Vietnamese on the ground. But then, of course, the main Swedish TV is  public, not privately owned. Not to say that we do not get some propaganda, but nothing like what’s dished up in the USA. I follow the major papers and some TV on the web, and I fail to understand how the people put up with this. If Goebbels still were around, he would eat his heart out with envy.

As far as I am concerned no one who flies up in the air carpetbombing a helpless civilian population, is a hero. McCain and others make out like these were Red Baron dog fighter times, or WW II RAF pilots who ran a much, much higher risk. The real heroes – if one wants to call them that ­­– in this totally immoral war were the grunts who actually had to meet the “enemy”. The same of course goes for the “heroic” bomber pilots in the present immoral wars in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq.

It is really depressing from our perspective, that such a large part of the US voters seem to be addicted to this kind of false heroic myths, to such a degree that one can build a whole election on some bomb raids 40 years ago committed on a hapless population by a greedy foreign power. It may well be that McCain felt at the time that he was doing the right thing, and felt proud of it. But it is depressing that 40 years later he still is proud of it, instead of regretting what he has doen and hang his head in shame. Even more depressing that close to half the voters lap this up.

And most depressing of all that even Obama and the Dems feel they have to pay lip service to this immoral hogwash and constantly debase themselves in worship of McCain the Hero.
Woe is us.

Woe indeed.

The Real John McCain

Our friend from Stockholm, quoted above, asks how come the US mainstream press hasn’t look closely at McCain’s conduct as a POW. That’s a no-brainer and even ABC’s Charlie Gibson could probably muster a truthful answer if he had to sit in Guantanamo for a couple of minutes. But most of the so-called “alternative media” has been nervous on this topic too. Somehow they think it’s dangerously counterproductive to assail so-called “heroes”, even if the heroism consisted of raining high explosive on peasants from 30,000 feet.

Not CounterPunch, I’m proud to say. We’ve run Doug Valentine’s investigations and other testimonies. And now, in our latest newsletter, released today, we take a long hard look at McCain the man: violent, deceitful, devoid of ethical principle. And that’s not us talking. That’s people who have known him well. Read the new stories by Doug Valentine, Jeffrey St Clair and myself. If the press had really homed in honestly on McCain instead of licking his boots for twenty years, he’d have been toast long, long ago.

So subscribe now to the newsletter. Read about McCain and read David Price’s savage investigation of the case of a scholar, Nicolas Flattes, whom the government is tying to blackmail into being a spook.
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Return to 68

Here on this site last week we ran Chellis Glendinning’s excellent piece "Retorno a 68", about the slaughter in Mexico City in 1968 during the Olympics.)  Chellis was discussing Paco Ignacio Taibo’s recent book, 68.

CounterPuncher Eric Jacobson, a public interest lawyer in Culver City, writes:

Chellis  might like to see the  Auden poem below,  if she hasn't run across it. He was referring to the Soviet Union's crushing of the Prague Spring but could just as well have been referring to Mexico City or a while later Chile, Argentina, Salvador, or ugly America today (albeit without the murderous lethality save for those poor souls who drive "taxis to the dark side", or God help them, urgently require medical attention while residing in a California prison with its sadistic guard force and decrepit medical system, now under federal court receivership).

Regarding Obama, isn't most of the problem that he rose because he embodied pluralistic/multicultural change, but instead of developing the theme that his knowledge of the world tells him is in America's interest, he decided to become a lackey for the establishment, literally the day after clinching the nomination, and has never really looked back?

It is a well worn road to perdition. Alas, the American Ogres will remain in charge.  Turns out my first vote for McGovern in '72 which I cast during my freshman year at Berkeley (I was part of the next cohort up from Chellis' time there) was my best and only one I will ever cast for president with any sense of real conviction that I am part of the solution. Oh well.

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech.
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

--W.H. Auden

Footnote: Portions of the first item also appear in The First Post.

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