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July 12, 2002
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
July 11, 2002
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
David Krieger
Law vs.
Force
David Vest
Fountain
of Foo:
Strike Three Called
Irit Katriel
A Deep
Ideological Crisis
Richard Glen Boire
Dangerous
Lessons:
Public School Drug Testing
July 10, 2002
CounterPunch Wire
Third Party
Woes
South Carolina Denies Kevin Alexander Gray Ballot Status
Nassar Ibriham &
Majed Nassar
Bush's
Middle East Plan: Always Changing, Never Changing
Robert Fisk
Ain't That
America:
A Strange Kind of Freedom
Dave Marsh
The Return
of CREEP:
Record Cartel Accounting
Bernard Weiner
Hope and
Despair in
the Body Politic
Gary Leupp
European
Worries and
Bush's Terror War
July 9, 2002
St. Clair / Cockburn
The Atomic
Clock is Ticking:
All Roads Lead to Yucca Mtn.
Jack McCarthy
Florida:
a Terrorist Sanctuary for Bush's Bloody Pals?
Robert Fisk
How a Saudi
Billionaire
Does Beirut
Stanton and Madsen
God, Incorporated
Kurt Nimmo
IDF, Gangbanging
with Tanks
Bill Christison
Disastrous
Foreign Policies
of the US Part 3:
What Can We Do About It?
July 8, 2002
Rick Mercier
Yucca
Mountain Bound
Lev Grinberg
The
BUSHARON Global War
Tariq Ali
How Bush
Used 9/11 to Remap the World
Lori Allen
The Tugs
of War:
Palestinian Life Under Curfew
July 7, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
White
House Crooks
July 6, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Loose
Lips:
Liberty, Democracy & Bush
Michael Neumann
What's
So Bad About Israel?
Steve Baughman
Ashcroft's
Vendetta:
Lynching John Lindh
July 5, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Bush Freezes Peace Process
Todd May
Independence
and Terrorism
Rahul Mahajan
Why I
Won't Celebrate the Fourth of July This Year
July 4, 2002
S. Brian Willson
What
the Flag Means to Me
Philip Farruggio
Independence Day and
the Working Poor
Tom Gorman
The Uncommon
Pledge
of Allegiance
Chris Floyd
Jungle
Fever:
Bush's Bolivian Mercenaries
July 3, 2002
Francis Boyle
The Death
of the Oslo Accords
Mokhiber / Weissman
Cracking
Down on Corp. Crime
Robert Jensen
Lynne
Cheney's Primer
Behzad Yaghmaian
An Alternative
to the G-8s Africa Initiative
Toward a Global AIDS Fund and a Living Wage
John Borowski
Public
Schools Under Seige
Norman Madarasz
Brazil,
the Workers' Party and the Financial Times
July 2, 2002
Leah Wells
The Wedding
Was a Bomb
CounterPunch Wire
Trial of
the SOA 37
Edward Hammond
Bombing
the Mind:
The Pentagon's Drug Warfare
Sam Bahour
Ramallah
Occupied:
Uninvited Guests Become Neighbors
July 1, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Brazil's
Triumph
June 28/30, 2002
Kathleen Christison
The True Story of Resolution
242 or How the US Sold Out
the Palestinians
Cockburn / St. Clair
Death,
Juries and Scalia
Tarif Abboushi
Bush's
Double Standard
on Israel
N.D. Jayaprakash
Seething
with Rage:
The Palestinian Saga
Michael Yates
Taking
the Pledge:
Teachers and the Flag
Stephen Zunes
Bush's
Speech a Setback
for Peace
Walt Brasch
The Pledge
v. The Constitution
Cockburn / St. Clair
Strikers
as Terrorists?
Tom Ridge Calls Longshoremen
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
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
INSIDE
EXCLUSIVE
TO
COUNTERPUNCH
SUBSCRIBERS
Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
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
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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July
12, 2002
The Other Harken
Energy Scandal
Oil, Death Squads and Corruption in Colombia
by Sean Donahue
Financial irregularities at Harken Energy during
President Bush's tenure at the Texas oil company have dominated
headlines in recent days. But the press has ignored a much bigger
scandal: how Harken Energy has benefited from war and terror
in Colombia.
George W. Bush went to work for Harken
Energy in 1986 when the company bought out Spectrum 7, a company
that had earlier purchased Bush's failed Arbusto oil company.
Harken gave Bush $2 million in stock options, a $122,000 consulting
job, and a seat on its board of directors.
While Bush was working for Harken, Rodrigo
Villamizar, an old friend Bush had met at a fraternity party
in 1972, became director of Colombia's bureau of Mines and Minerals,
the ministry that oversees the sale of oil concessions by the
state oil company, Ecopetrol. According to a December 2001 report
in Counterpunch,, Bush had helped Villamizar out in the '70's
by getting him first a job with the Texas state senate's Economic
Development committee, and then a seat on the state Public Utilities
Commission. Toward the end of Bush's tenure at Harken, Villamizar
returned the favor by granting Harken a series of oil contracts
in Colombia.
The bulk of the oil contracts were in
the Magdalena Valley where military officers, drug traffickers,
and cattle ranchers had come together to form right wing paramilitary
groups that fought guerillas, assassinated union leaders and
human rights activists, and terrorized peasants in order to force
them off coveted land. Most of the oil companies doing business
in the region either tacitly accepted or actively sought out
the protection of these death squads. A 1996 Human Rights Watch
report documents the fact that the Colombian military armed and
assisted these groups and, under the guidance of the CIA, integrated
them into its intelligence networks. The close cooperation between
the military and the paramilitaries continues today - and tends
to be most rampant in areas where there is a lot of oil production.
The State Department has listed the paramilitaries as terrorist
organizations, but has looked the other way as the <U.S.-funded>
Colombian army has continued to rely on them to do its dirty
work in its war against dissidents. Harken is still doing business
in the Magdalena Valley, thanks in part to funding from the World
Bank's International Finance Corporation, and paramilitaries
continue to terrorize anyone who threatens corporate interests
in the region.
Noone is alleging that President Bush
personally ordered paramilitaries to kill peasants and intimidate
union leaders in order to improve Harken's bottom line. But at
the same time, given his close ties to Villamizar, and the fact
that his father was President at the time, its highly unlikely
that Bush was ignorant of the human rights issues involved in
oil drilling in Colombia.
All of this has a very immediate relevance
today because Villamizar, who left Colombia to escape corruption
charges and is now a covicted felon and fugitive from justice,
drafted the Colombia policy for the Bush campaign in 2000, and
still maintains close ties to the President. Counterpunch reports
that Villamizar, who should be serving four years in a Colombian
prison, was Bush's first choice to serve as Assistant Secretary
of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, but turned down the
appointment.
Villamizar's recommendations on expanding
U.S. military aid to Colombia have been largely accepted by the
Bush administration, and a new President in Colombia with links
to the death squads is poised to use expanded U.S. aid to dramatically
escalate the country's forty year civil war against leftist guerillas.
Hundreds of U.S. military advisors are on the ground in Colombia
today. Officially they have no combat role, but that is likely
to change when the guerillas begin treating the advisors as military
targets. Colin Powell's old doctrine of making sure the U.S.
has clear military goals and a viable exit strategy before getting
involved in a war seems to have been completely forgotten.
The cornerstone of Bush's new military
aid package is a $98 million grant to help the Colombian government
establish a new battalion of its army's 18th Brigade to protect
an oil pipeline against guerilla attacks. The 18th Brigade has
a long history of ties to the paramilitaries, and its own history
of attacks on civilians - earlier this year soldiers killed a
teenage boy for walking too close to the pipeline. Ironically
the first beneficiary of this program will be Occidental Petroleum,
the company that helped the Gore family make its fortune. But
U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson has said that in the long run
the Pentagon is eyeing similar programs for other key economic
assets in Colombia. These would likely include pipelines maintained
by Harken's subsidiary, Global Energy Development, , a natural
gas pipeline operated by Enron, and projects involving Dick Cheney's
old company, Haliburton, as well as assets owned or used by Texaco,
Exxon-Mobil, and BP.
The Bush administration's conflicts of
interest in Colombia need to be investigated, exposed, and thoroughly
examined before the U.S. gets drawn deeper into Colombia's bloody
war.
Sean Donahue
is co-director of New Hampshire Peace Action and has written
and spoken extensively on U.S. policy toward Colombia. He is
available for interviews and speaking engagements and can be
reached at wrldhealer@yahoo.com.
Today's
Features
Steve Perry
A Tale
of Two Twits
Wall Street Burns, Bush Fiddles, But Where's Wellstone?
Lloyd Marbet
Arrested
by the Chamber
of Commerce
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