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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 May 19, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts The Politics and Economics of Outsourcing   May 18, 2005 Jean Bricmont Vive La France? Laura Carlsen Bush's Posada Carriles Quandry: an Anti-Cuba Terrorist is Still a Terrorist Mike Whitney The Secret Raids of Alberto Gonzales: 10,000 Swept Up Joshua Frank Flushing the Koran: Why Newsweek Got It Right George Galloway Thusly, I Humiliated Norm Coleman (and Christopher Hitchens) Manuel Garcia, Jr. Writing Tickets for American War Crimes Dwight D. Eisenhower How the GOP will Destroy Itself Dave Lindorff The Plot to Make the PATRIOT Act Even Worse May 17, 2005 Mickey Z. GIs Behaving Badly Petuuche Gilbert The People of Acoma Still Fight to be Free Paul Craig Roberts Lies That Kill: Why Isn't Bush in the Dock? Ramzy Baroud The New Palestinian Uprising Robert Jensen / Pat Youngblood Pinning the Blame on Newsweek Stan Cox Poisoning Patancheru: the Severe Side Effects of India's Drug Industry Dave Zirin American Anthem: Ozzie Guillen and Fining for Freedom Diana Barahona Reporters Without Borders Unmasked Website of the Day Revolutionary Flower Pot Society May 16, 2005 Michael Gillespie The Family Released a Statement: Death Notices for the Warrior Theocracy Jason Leopold BP Stains the Arctic Jesse Muldoon How Many Schools Left Behind? Norman Solomon Media and the War: "The Bombs in Iraq Explode at Home" Robert Cray Twenty Patrick Cockburn Iraq is a Bloody No Man's Land Website of the Day Bolton's Divorce Papers: She Took It All Away, Including Most of the Furniture May 14 / 15, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Join the 14 Per Cent Club! Saul Landau Lessons from Vietnam: Wars Kill Empires as Well as People Gary Leupp Whither Yale? Towards the Imperial University JoAnn Wypijewski The Glory that is Lockhart, Texas Ben Tripp The Wayward Airplane: a Cautionary Tale Brian J. Foley Was Jesus Gay? Tom Barry Bolton the Eavesdropper Mitchell Verter Barbarous Oaxaca: Indigenous Rights Groups Meet the "Law of the Club" Mike Ferner War on COs: Army Files Additional Charges Against Kevin Benderman Dan Smith Perceiving Darfur Mark Scaramella Death with Pitfalls Don Fitz Mommy, Is This a Finger in My Rice Puffs?: Splicing Human DNA into the Food Chain Diane Farsetta PR Industry Imitates Big Tobacco: the Senate's "Fake News" Hearings Michael Dickinson Soldier Crawling: Military Conscription in Turkey Ron Jacobs The Jackson State Murders Fred Gardner "Hydroponics? 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Lind Reality Gap: the Myth of US Invincibilty Jack Random The Dubious Wisdom of George W. Bush Gary Leupp Douglas Feith Bares His Soul to Jeffrey Goldberg     May 11, 2005 Patrick Cockburn The Rise, Fall and Rise of Ahmed Chalabi: King of Jordan to Pardon His $300 Million Bank Swindle Kevin Zeese The Occupation Gets More Saddam-like Every Day Christopher Brauchli Coffee, Tea or Torture?: A One Way Ticket to Uzbekistan Zalman Amit The Collapse of Academic Freedom in Israel: Tantura, Teddy Katz and Haifa University Robert Shull Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops: Senate Gives DHS Power to Waive All Laws Mike Whitney God, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Anti-Arabic Week at a Southern High School Norman Solomon Political Bluster and the Filibuster     May 10, 2005 Richard Drayton The Imperial Mythology of WW II: an Ethical Blank Check Dave Zirin Steve Nash's Brilliant Year: Anti-War Hoopster Wins NBA's MVP Jackie Corr The Medicare Catch: Mrs. O'Hara's Windfall Dave Lindorff Silence of the Scams: Economists on China Michael Donnelly From Roadless to Clueless: the Great Stillborn Eco Victory Reza Fiyouzat Nomadic Abstracts Scott Parkin Taking Direct Action Against Halliburton Stephen Babcock The Burden of Knowing Better Alan Farago Florida, Water and Lobbyists Michael Neumann Naomi's Courage Website of the Day One Nation Under Plagiarism     May 9, 2005 Louis Proyect Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond, Greenwasher Robert Fisk "Mission Accomplished": the Occupation, Year Two Kevin Zeese Concientious Objection on Trial: the Court Martial of Keith Benderman Joshua Frank Kerry Bashes Gay Marriage Sasha Kramer A Mother's Day Call for Justice in Haiti's Prisons Andrew Wimmer Create and Resist Jeffrey Webber Back to the Streets in Bolivia? Jeffrey St. Clair Straight to Bechtel   May 7 / 8, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Who Beat Hitler? Gary Leupp Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism Saul Landau Pope Torquemada: Purges, Pedophiles and Cover-Ups Joe DeRaymond Autumn of the Revolutionary: Another Look at Daniel Ortega Daniela Ponce Seeing Chile in Nepal Heather Williams Hollywood Does Enron Gregory Elich Zimbabwe's Fight for Justice Anis Memon To Cuba and Back John Chuckman The Peculiar State: "Criticism of Israel is a Form of Anti-Semitism" Mike Whitney Hard Right Rage Against the Truth Ron Jacobs Re-Reading "Born on the Fourth of July" as the Iraq War Grinds On Colin Kalmbacher Whither Disorder? Ann Coulter and the Texas Police State, Cont. Lance Selfa Uprising in Mexico City Fred Gardner "Getting High is a Little Like Cuba" Ben Tripp Letters on Wittgenstein Mickey Z. The Mother of All Days Richard Joseph Those Patriotic Magnets Dr. Susan Block Come As You Are: Masturbation 101 Poets' Basement Smith-Ferri, Louise, Nettnin, Engel and Albert   May 6, 2005 Patrick Cockburn Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and Blood Erin Yoshioka Another "3 Strikes" Travesty: Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison? Sam Husseini Talking with Syrians Dave Lindorff Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters Kevin Zeese Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead Guilty Joshua Frank An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War Dan Bacher Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water Raid P. Sainath India's Bloody Water Wars   May 5, 2005 Carles Mutaner Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist" or "Populist?" Carl G. Estabrook Is There Any Hope for the Pope? Farrah Hassen The US's Syrian Obsession Kevin Zeese "Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview with Patrick Resta Michael Leonardi May Day with an American Soldier in Rome Bennett Ramberg The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You Ray McGovern The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit Norman Solomon Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran Nicole Colson The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights Brian Concannon, Jr. Clearing the Fences in Haiti     May 4, 2005 Colin Kalmbacher Ann Coulter and the Police State: Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested John Walsh Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying on Air America to Support the War Greg Moses Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises "Birth of a Nation" Ali Khan Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart Chris Floyd Ring Them Bells Linda S. Heard D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics Dave Zirin The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle William S. Lind Fool's Paradise Gary Leupp Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution Website of the Day Kent State, May 4, 1970   May 3, 2005 Dave Lindorff Bush has Grasped the Third Rail, Now Turn on the Juice Brian Cloughley Halliburton's War Loot Ira Kurzban Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers Seth Sandronsky Towards Debtors' Prisons? Gilad Atzmon The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More Michael Donnelly Branding Eco Collapse Alex Sanchez Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush? Peter Linebaugh Magna Carta and May Day   May 2, 2005 Ron Jacobs Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement Stan Goff The Case of Hasan Akbar Karyn Strickler Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics Joshua Frank Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly Kevin Zeese Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam Vicente Navarro Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician       April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and "Credibility" Gabriel Kolko Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later Jennifer Loewenstein The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood Lee Sustar City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago Saul Landau The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power T.W. Croft The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy Nikolas Kozloff Fox News v. Hugo Chavez William Blum Never-Ending Double Standards Dave Lindorff Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly Joshua Frank The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls Doug Giebel Saving Jane Fonda Steven Erlanger A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief Fred Gardner Washington State Doctor Harassed Mike Whitney Another Mad Bush Press Conference Kurt Nimmo Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine Joe DeRaymond A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania Michael Dickinson Flags Mickey Z. May Day at Yankee Stadium Justin Taylor The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy Poets Basement Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair Website of the Weekend Save Barbados's Cowpastor                                             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

May 19, 2005 Tagging British Peace Activists The Trouble with Menwith By MICHAEL DICKINSON ISTANBUL. FFirst the good news. A packed courtroom in Harrogate, England this week applauded when a judge threw out an attempt by the Ministry of Defence to use an asbo against veteran peace protester Lindis Percy. 'Asbos' are 'Anti-Social Behaviour Orders' which the British government introduced in 1999. Basically, their purpose is to reduce crime and disorder. To target and tackle activities which disrupt the lives of individuals, families or communities. Anyone can apply for an asbo on anyone else. All you have to do to satisfy the civil court that they deserve one is to prove that the accused caused or was likely to cause 'harassment, alarm or distress', and if you succeed in doing that -- congratulations! - you've scored an Asbo! Now your asboed victim has to refrain from doing what they were doing for at least 2 years. If however they don't refrain, then this time they are committing a criminal offence - and can face a penalty of up to five years in prison. Catch 22 revisited. Judge Roy Anderson told the court that the law clearly intended asbos to be used against "oafish and intimidating" behaviour, and none of the incidents involving Lindis Percy "was accompanied by any aggressive behaviour, abusive language or any threats of violence. Her convictions all seem to stem from her activities as a peace campaigner." "She may, in her relentless expression of her views, be thought by many to be a fanatic and, I suspect, by some to be a crank. Nevertheless she is entitled to express these views unless she breaks the criminal law of this country." He dismissed the attempt by the Ministry of Defence as an attempt "to use a club to beat down the expression of legitimate comment and the expression of views on matters of public concern". But now for the bad news. Applause was replaced by cries of "Shame!" as Judge Roy Anderson instead imposed an eight-week 8pm to 6am curfew and electronic tag on Lindis Percy, the first time tagging has been ordered on a British peace campaigner. Outside the court, Mrs Percy said she would appeal against the sentence, and added: "You can't suppress the human spirit. If any good comes from this case, I hope that it's that people will hear and read about it and more of them will get involved with protesting about what's happening at Menwith Hill. This is political. This is all about the American bases in this country and what the Americans are doing here." Menwith Hill? American bases? Who is this woman and what is she talking about? Let's read and find out Lindis Percy is a 63 year old midwife, an anti-war protester and political activist who has been arrested, detained and charged many times over 20 years, imprisoned on 12 occasions. She made the news in 2003 by dodging tight security to scale the six-meter high wrought iron gates of Buckingham Palace on the eve of U.S. President's George W. Bush's state visit to Britain, unfurling an upside-down U.S. flag with the inscription 'Elizabeth Windsor and Co we don't want him here.' She was arrested and later bailed. But that wasn't the reason for the Asbo application. Lindis Percy is Co-Coordinator of the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases (CAAB) working to bring public scrutiny and accountability to US Visiting Forces and their Agencies in the UK, and since 1990 has taken part in pickets and demonstrations outside the Menwith Hill monitoring station in order to highlight concerns about the function of the base; the secrecy which surrounds it and the lack of accountability of the base to parliament. RAF Menwith Hill looms out of the mist on the bleak North Yorkshire moors, a series of huge white domes, looking like giant golf balls. The perimeter fence is punctuated by watchtowers and patrolled by guard dogs. Curious passers-by who linger to stare are quickly met by military guards who inquire as to the nature of their interest. Sprawling across 560 acres, it has an operation centre and on-site town, including houses, shops, a chapel and a sports centre. It also has its own uninterruptible electricity supply. The name is misleading -- it is not a British airbase. It is the largest electronic monitoring station in the world, and it's run by the US National Security Agency (NSA), which monitors the world's communication for US intelligence. It has a staff of more than 1,400 American staff including engineers, physicists, mathematicians, linguists and computer scientists, plus 370 staff from the Ministry of Defense, working around the clock inside "hardened" buildings intercepting and analyzing communications mainly from Europe, Russia and the Middle East. NSA and its charter and any mention of its duties are classified. All telecommunications traffic to and from Europe and passing through Britain is intercepted at the base, including private telephone calls, faxes, emails and other communications. Much of the information is collected, processed and relayed back to the United States automatically. A great deal of this information comes from spy satellites and the large golfballs or "radomes" contain satellite receiving dishes. NSA controls a global spy system called ECHELON, shared with the GCHQ of England, the CSE of Canada, the Australian DSD, and the GCSB of New Zealand. These organizations are bound together under a secret 1948 agreement, UKUSA, whose terms and text remain secret even today. This system positions communications receiving stations all over the world to capture all satellite, microwave, cellular and fiber-optic traffic, and then processes this information through the massive computer capabilities of the NSA, including voice recognition and OCR technology, and looks for code words or phrases (known as the ECHELON "dictionaries"). Intelligence analysts at each of the respective "listening stations" analyze any conversation or document flagged by the system and forwards any relevant information back to NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland. Most of the information gathered by this system passes through without notice to the intelligence agencies. But if you should mention the word "bomb" or "Bin Ladin" or maybe even "Bush" or "revolution" in a phone conversation, you can be sure that some intelligence analyst will review the transcript of your conversation to ensure that you are not engaged in a terrorist plot. And who knows what other words they might have in their 'dictionaries'? Voicing his opinion in 1975, Senator Frank Church cautioned against the technological power of the NSA: "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny. There would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capacity of this technology." And shortly before he was killed in a road accident in May 1994, in a speech in the House of Commons MP Bob Cryer, a committed supporter of the peace movement opined: "Menwith Hill is a spy station- a sophisticated version of the man in the dirty raincoat looking through a bedroom window or the pervert spying through a lavatory keyhole. Those who defend the station's invasion of our land, which has never been approved by parliament, are no better. There is no glory or wonderful purpose involved in Menwith Hill. That is all the more true now that the cold war is over. Ministers justified the Menwith Hill base by saying it was part of the cold war, but we understand that that has finished. What is their justification for the spy station now?" The weekly non-violent protests organized by the Campaign for Accountability of American Bases outside at Menwith Hill are aimed at the base's employees and involve holding up US flags with the words "No More Meddling Please" written on them. After Lindis Percy's last arrest she was found guilty of five counts of obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty and obstructing the highway, and along with fellow campaigner, Anni Rainbow, with aggravated trespass and resisting arrest. The Ministry of Defence police then decided to apply for the Asbo against her, accusing Ms Percy of 'frightening, harassing and alarming the community including babies and children'. In a statement Ms Percy said: "The application for this Asbo is all about stifling peaceful protest." This week the Ministry of Defence failed in its attempt to use one against her. However, although he rejected the attempt, before passing sentence, Judge Anderson warned that "there could be circumstances where anti-social behaviour orders may be used against those engaging in political or other protests, if they indulged in intimidating behaviour". In the meantime, the alternative he came up with was to tag her and keep keep her under house arrest overnight. But the indefatigable Lindis Percy says that she will continue to protest at Menwith Hill, and along with other campaigners is determined to make the work of the base properly accountable to parliament. MICHAEL DICKINSON is a writer and artist who works as an English teacher in Istanbul, Turkey. He designed the cover art for two CounterPunch books, Serpents in the Garden and Dime's Worth of Difference, as well as Grand Theft Pentagon, forthcoming from Common Courage Press. He can be contacted through his website of collage pictures at http://CARNIVAL_OF_CHAOS.TRIPOD.COM