Coming
in October
From AK Press
Today's
Stories
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Leavitt
for EPA Head? He's Much Worse Than You Thought
Recent
Stories
September 17, 2003
Timothy J. Freeman
The
Terrible Truth About Iraq
St. Clair / Cockburn
A
Vain, Pompous Brown-noser:
Meet the Real Wesley Clark
Terry Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Moore on Gen. Wesley Clark
Mitchel Cohen
Don't Be Fooled Again: Gen. Wesley Clark, War Criminal
Norman Madarasz
Targeting Arafat
Richard Forno
High Tech Heroin
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Website of the Day
The Ultimate Palestine Resource Site!
September 16, 2003
Rosemary and Walt Brasch
An
Ill Wind: Hurricane Isabel and the Lack of Homeland Security
Robert Fisk
Powell
in Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
Imperial Sociopaths
M. Shahid Alam
The Dialectics
of Terror
Ron Jacobs
Exile at Gunpoint
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's War on Wages
Al Krebs
Stop Calling Them "Farm Subsidies"; It's Corporate
Welfare
Patrick Cockburn
The
Iraq Wreck
Website of the Day
From Occupied Palestine
September 15, 2003
Stan Goff
It Was
the Oil; It Is Like Vietnam
Robert Fisk
A Hail of Bullets, a Trail of Dead
Writers Bloc
We
Are Winning: a Report from Cancun
James T. Phillips
Does George Bush Cry?
Elaine Cassel
The Troublesome Bill of Rights
Cynthia McKinney
A Message to the People of New York City
Matthew Behrens
Sunday Morning Coming Down: Reflections on Johnny Cash
Uri Avnery
Assassinating
Arafat
Hammond Guthrie
Celling Out the Alarm
Website of the Day
Arnold and the Egg
September 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
The Great Alejandro Escavedo Needs Your Help!
September 12, 2003
Writers Block
Todos
Somos Lee: Protest and Death in Cancun
Laura Carlsen
A Knife to the Heart: WTO Kills Farmers
Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Sept. 11
Elaine Cassel
Bush at Quantico
Linda S. Heard
British
Entrance Exams
John Chuckman
The First Two Years of Insanity
Doug Giebel
Ending America as We Know It
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Blank Check Military
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Website of the Day
A Woman in Baghdad
September 11, 2003
Robert Fisk
A Grandiose
Folly
Roger Burbach
State Terrorism and 9/11: 1973 and 2001
Jonathan Franklin
The Pinochet Files
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Postcards to the President
Norman Solomon
The Political Capital of 9/11
Saul Landau
The Chilean Coup: the Other, Almost Forgotten 9/11
Stew Albert
What Goes Around
Website of the Day
The Sights and Sounds of a Coup
September 10, 2003
John Ross
Cancun
Reality Show: Will It Turn Into a Tropical Seattle?
Zoltan Grossman
The General Who Would be President: Was Wesley Clark Also Unprepared
for the Postwar Bloodbath?
Tim Llewellyn
At the Gates of Hell
Christopher Brauchli
Turn the Paige: the Bush Education Deception
Lee Sustar
Bring the Troops Home, Now!
Elaine Cassel
McCain-Feingold in Trouble: Scalia Hogs the Debate
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Hammond Guthrie
When All Was Said and Done
Website of the Day
Fact Checking Colin Powell
Hot Stories
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
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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September
18, 2003
The Fire Last Time
Wesley
Clark and Waco
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Originally Published June, 1999
On February 28, 1993 the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms launched its disastrous and lethal raid on the
Branch Dividian compound outside Waco, Texas. Even before the
raid, members of the US Armed Forces, many of them in civilian
dress, were around the compound.
In the wake of the Feb 28 debacle Texas
governor Anne Richards asked to consult with knowledgeable military
personnel. Her request went to the US Army base at Fort Hood,
where the commanding officer of the US Army's III corps referred
her to the Cavalry Division of the III Corps, whose commander
at the time was Wesley Clark. Subsequent congressional enquiry
records that Richards met with Wesley Clark's number two, the
assistant division commander, who advised her on military equipment
that might be used in a subsequent raid. Clark's man, at Richard's
request, also met with the head of the Texas National Guard.
Two senior Army officers subsequently
travelled to a crucial April 14 meeting in Washington, D.C.
with Attorney General Janet Reno and Justice Department and
FBI officials in which the impending April 19 attack on the
compound was reviewed. The 186-page "Investigation into
the Activities of Federal Law Enforcement Agencies Towards the
Branch Davidians", prepared by the Committee on Government
Reform and Oversight and lodged in 1996 (CR 104 749) does not
name these two officers and at deadline CounterPunch has so
far been unable to unearth them. One of these officers had reconnoitered
the Branch Davidian compound a day earlier, on April 13. During
the Justice Dept. meeting one of the officers told Reno that
if the military had been called in to end a barricade situation
as part of a military operation in a foreign country, it would
focus its efforts on "taking out" the leader of the
operation.
Ultimately tanks from Fort Hood were
used in the final catastrophic assault on the Branch Davidian
compound on April 19. Certainly the Waco onslaught bears characteristics
typical of Gen. Wesley Clark: the eagerness to take out the
leader (viz., the Clark-ordered bombing of Milosevich's private
residence); the utter disregard for the lives of innocent men,
women and children; the arrogant miscalculations about the effects
of force; disregard for law, whether of the Posse Comitatus
Act governing military actions within the United States or,
abroad, the purview of the Nuremberg laws on war crimes and
attacks on civilians.
Waco Update:
The Delta Force Was There
Amid Nato military supremo Wesley Clark's
onslaught on the civilians of Serbia the question arose: did
Clark hone his civilian-killing skills at Waco, where the FBI
oversaw the largest single spasm of slaughter of civilians by
law enforcement in US history, when nearly a hundred Branch
Davidians died amid an assault by tanks, flame-throwers and
snipers.
The tanks were from Fort Hood, where
Wesley Clark was, in early 1993, commander of the Cavalry Division
of the US Army's III Corps. In our last issue we cited a congressional
report commissioned in the aftermath of Waco which described
how Texas governor Anne Richards had consulted with Clark's
number two at Fort Hood. Then, on April 14, there was a summit
at the Justice Department in Washington, where Attorney General
Janet Reno, top Justice Department and FBI officials and two
unnamed senior Army officers reviewed the final assault plan
scheduled for April 19.
The two Army officers at the Justice
Department that day were Colonel Gerald Boykin, and his superior,
Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the head of Special Forces at Fort
Bragg. Though Clark (who had served with Schoomaker) was not
directly involved in the onslaught on the Branch Davidians,
the role of the US Army in that affair throws into harsh relief
the way prohibitions against the use of the US military for
civilian law enforcement can be swiftly by-passed.
Boykin and Schoomacher were present because
the Army's Fort Bragg-based Combat Applications Group-popularly
known as the Delta Force-had been enlisted as part of the assault
team on the Branch Davidian Compound. It appears that President
Clinton had signed a waiver of the Posse Comitatus Act, with
the precedent being Ronald Reagan's revocation of the Act in
1987, allowing the Delta Force to be involved in suppressing
the Atlanta prison riot.
The role of the Delta Force, the identity
of the two Army officers, the revocation of Posse Comitatus
all form part of the disclosures of a forthcoming documentary
film, Waco: A New Revelation, put together by part of the team
that produced an earlier, excellent film, Waco: Rules of Engagement.
Following our questions about Wesley Clark's possible involvement
at Waco, producer/researcher Mike McNulty called us with some
details of his new documentary-directed by Jason van Fleet and
due to be released in July.
After energetic use of Freedom of Information
Act enquiries, plus research in three repositories in Texas
holding evidence from the Waco inferno, plus other extensive
investigations, McNulty and his team have put together an explosive
file:
. 28 video tapes from the repositories
show that in the final onslaught on the Waco compound were members
of the US military in special assault gear and with name tags
obscured. As noted above, Clinton's revocation of the Posse
Comitatus Act made this presence legal. McNulty isolates Vince
Foster as the White House point man for the Waco operation.
McNulty cites Foster's widow as saying
that the depression that prompted the White House lawyer's death
was fueled by horror at the carnage at Waco for which the White
House had given the ultimate green light. Foster was writing
a Waco report when he died. McNulty says that some documents
about Foster and Waco were among those removed from his office
after his death, later to surface in a White house store room
sheltering archives of the First Lady.
The film, McNulty says, discloses how
the federal assault team placed explosives on top of a compound
bunker whither the feds believed the Branch Davidian leaders
might flee. Material evidence collected by McNulty shows that
the FBI/Delta assault force bombarded the compound with pyrophoric--i.e.
fire-causing--projectiles.
Erosion of Posse Comitatus Act prohibitions
on the involvement of the US military in law enforcement here
is particularly sinister. The congressional report on Waco
showed that some Army officers were extremely disturbed at requests
for military assistance by the FBI, and there were some acrimonious
exchanges at the time. The drug war, needless to say, has been
a prime solvent in this process of erosion. One factor is the
malign cross-fertilization occurring when these so-called "elite
units"--the Army's Combat Application Group, the FBI's
Hostage Rescue Team, the Navy's SEALs--all train together, along
with SWAT teams from police forces across the country. Thousands
of law enforcement officers have now cut their teeth on the
homicidal commando techniques most flagrantly displayed by
the killers assembled in the British SAS, members of which were
also present at the Waco siege. The Rambo mindset now saturates
law enforcement, and even the rangers in Fish and Game Departments
now pack heat. Both CounterPunch editors have had the experience
of being asked to down their fly rods and produce ID, by young
Fish and Game rangers with semi-automatics on their hips.
Weekend
Edition Features for Sept. 13 / 14, 2003
Michael Neumann
Anti-Americanism:
Too Much of a Good Thing?
Jeffrey St. Clair
Anatomy of a Swindle
Gary Leupp
The Matrix of Ignorance
Ron Jacobs
Reagan's America
Brian Cloughley
Up to a Point, Lord Rumsfeld
William S. Lind
Making Mesopotamia a Terrorist Magnet
Werther
A Modest Proposal for the Pentagon
Dave Lindorff
Friendly Fire Will Doom the Occupation
Toni Solo
Fiction and Reality in Colombia: The Trial of the Bogota Three
Elaine Cassel
Juries and the Death Penalty
Mickey Z.
A Parable for Cancun
Jeffrey Sommers
Issam Nashashibi: a Life Dedicated to the Palestinian Cause
David Vest
Driving in No Direction (with a Glimpse of Johnny Cash)
Michael Yates
The Minstrel Show
Jesse Walker
Adios, Johnny Cash
Adam Engel
Something Killer
Poets' Basement
Cash, Albert, Curtis, Linhart
Website of the Weekend
Local Harvest
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