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Before Kill and Run, Was There Rape and Run? Documents Show the FBI Gave Janklow a Pass by Stephen Hendricks; The Faces of Janus: Why the New York Times Has Always Been a Rotten Paper by Alexander Cockburn; Steal a Tree, Go To Jail; Steal a Forest, Stay in the Lincoln Bedroom: the Politics of Timber Theft by Jeffrey St. Clair; A Southern Africa Sojourn by Lawrence Reichard; The Kiev Con: Exposing David Duke's Illusory Doctorate; CounterPunch Online is read by 70,000 visitors each day, but we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Today's Stories

January 17 / 18, 2003

Joe Quandt
Suicide Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities

January 16, 2004

Kathy Kelly
A Visit to Umm Qasr Prison

William S. Lind
More Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare

Gillian Russom
So. Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"

Ari Shavit
Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris

Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris

Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich

Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2

 

January 15, 2004

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Memo to the President: Your State of the Union Address

John Chuckman
Dry Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc

Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter

Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon

Gary Leupp
The Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan

 

January 14, 2004

Greg Moses
Happy Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to Bigots

Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights

Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional Dems (and Dean)

Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to Clinton

Alexander Cockburn
Bush, Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last

 

January 13, 2004

William S. Lind
How 2004 Looks from Potsdam

M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?

Mickey Z
Snipers: No Nuts in Iraq

Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro: The Prisoner and the Presidents

Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?

 

January 12, 2004

Ben Tripp
No Stan for the Kurds

Norman Solomon
The Dixie Trap: Democrats and the South

Mike Whitney
O'Neill's Revenge

Jason Leopold
From the Very First Instant It Was About Iraq

Uri Avnery
Syria's Peace Proposal

 

January 10 / 11, 2004

Alexander Cockburn
Bush as Hitler? Let's Be Fair

Susan Davis
Dangerous Books

Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell

Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past

Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq

Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety

Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?

Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List

Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost

Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War

Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry

Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?

Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common

Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike

Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page

Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball

Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon

Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert

 

January 9, 2004

David Lindorff
The Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses

Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand

Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's Non-existent WMDs

Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable

David Vest
Disabled Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld

 

January 8, 2004

Neve Gordon
Israeli Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail

Lenni Brenner
Dr. Dean and the Godhead

Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks

Mark Scaramella
Inside the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium

Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit

James Hollander
Journalists Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad

 

January 7, 2004

Democracy Now!
Uncharitable Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured

Greg Weiher
The Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem

Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003

Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors

Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky

Bob Boldt
God Talk

Ramon Ryan
Small Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista Uprising

 

 

January 6, 2004

Dave Lindorff
RNC Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads

Ron Jacobs
Drugs in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism

Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia

Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go

John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo-Con Manifesto

Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake

John L. Hess
A Record to Dissent From

Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT

David Price
"Like Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation

 

January 5, 2004

Al Krebs
How Now Mad Cow!

Kathy Kelly
Squatting in Baghdad's Bomb Craters

Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons

Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm

Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the Cuban Revolution

Gary Leupp
North Korea for Dummies

 

 

January 3 / 4, 2004

Brian Cloughley
Never Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History

Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time

William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11

Glen Martin
Jesus vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse

Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage

Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble

Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia

Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left

Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case

Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy

William Blum
Codework Orange!

Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara

Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA

Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler

Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100

Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick

Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes

Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis

 

 

 

January 2, 2004

Stan Cox
Red Alert 2016

Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans

Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana

Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?

David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth


January 1, 2004

Randall Robinson
Honor Haiti, Honor Ourselves

David Krieger
Looking Back on 2003

Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs

Stan Goff
War, Race and Elections

Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac

Website of the Day
Embody Bags


December 31, 2003

Ray McGovern
Don't Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation

Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria

Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned

Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George

Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead

 

 

 

December 30, 2003

Michael Neumann
Criticism of Israel is Not Anti-Semitism

Annie Higgins
When They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary

Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades

Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish

Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat

Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?

 

 

December 29, 2003

Mark Hand
The Washington Post in the Dock?

David Lindorff
The Bush Election Strategy

Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War

Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?

Uri Avnery
Israel's Conscientious Objectors

 

December 27 / 28, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
A Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul

Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World

Saul Landau
Iraq at the End of the Year

Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David Meggysey

Robert Fisk
Iraq Through the American Looking Glass

Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?

Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0

Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution

Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market

Susan Davis
Lord of the (Cash Register) Rings

Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California

Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish

Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce

Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music

 

 

December 26, 2003

Gary Leupp
Bush Doings: Doing the Language

 

December 25, 2003

Diane Christian
The Christmas Story

Elaine Cassel
This Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us

Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock

Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead

Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem

Alexander Cockburn
The Magnificient 9

Guthrie / Albert
Another Colorful Season

 

 

 

December 24, 2003

M. Shahid Alam
The Semantics of Empire

William S. Lind
Marley's List for Santa in Wartime

Josh Frank
Iraqi Oil: First Come, First Serve

Cpt. Paul Watson
The Mad Cowboy Was Right

Robert Lopez
Nuance and Innuendo in the War on Iraq

 

 


December 23, 2003

Brian J. Foley
Duck and Cover-up

Will Youmans
Sharon's Ultimatum

Michael Donnelly
Here They Come Again: Another Big Green Fiasco

Uri Avnery
Sharon's Speech: the Decoded Version

December 22, 2003

Jeffrey St. Clair
Pray to Play: Bush's Faith-Based National Parks

Patrick Gavin
What Would Lincoln Do?

Marjorie Cohn
How to Try Saddam: Searching for a Just Venue

Kathy Kelly
The Two Troublemakers: "Guilty of Being Palestinians in Iraq"

 

December 20 / 21, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
How to Kill Saddam

Saul Landau
Bush Tries Farce as Cuba Policy

Rafael Hernandez
Empire and Resistance: an Interview with Tariq Ali

David Vest
Our Ass and Saddam's Hole

Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis

Greg Weiher
Lessons from the Israeli School on How to Win Friends in the Islamic World

Christopher Brauchli
Arrest, Smear, Slink Away: Dr. Lee and Cpt. Yee

Carol Norris
Cheers of a Clown: Saddam and the Gloating Bush

Bruce Jackson
The Nameless and the Detained: Bush's Disappeared

Juliana Fredman
A Sealed Laboratory of Repression

Mickey Z.
Holiday Spirit at the UN

Ron Jacobs
In the Wake of Rebellion: The Prisoner's Rights Movement and Latino Prisoners

Josh Frank
Sen. Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

John L. Hess
Slow Train to the Plane

Adam Engel
Black is Indeed Beautiful

Ben Tripp
The Relevance of Art in Times of Crisis

Michael Neumann
Rhythm and Race

Poets' Basement
Cullen, Engel, Albert & Guthrie

 

 

 

 



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Weekend Edition
January 17 / 18, 2004

There's a Wall Between Us

Rupert Murdoch and My Sister

By RICHARD EDMONDSON

How powerful and controlling is the propaganda that rains upon the American people? Do even the words of a loved one make a difference when they conflict with a perceived reality that has been constructed by Fox News and the rest of the big media?

I recently moved from San Francisco to a small community outside of Nashville, Tennessee. I was born and grew up in this part of the country, and after 18 years living in California this was kind of a homecoming for me. A sad homecoming-my mother had passed away in the intervening years-but a homecoming nonetheless.

The other day I got together with my sister. We went out to a place called Harpeth Hills Cemetery, a scant five miles or so from the house we had grown up in, and laid some flowers upon our mother's grave. Then we stopped for lunch afterward. Over lunch I mentioned that I am planning to vote for Dennis Kucinich for president.

"Who's he?" asked my sister.

I wasn't surprised at the question, given the fact that the media have all but ignored the Kucinich campaign.

"He's a congressman from Ohio," I said, adding that I was for him because he had opposed the war in Iraq.

Mention of the war opened up a whole new avenue to our conversation. She is a reasonably intelligent, 45-year old woman, my sister. Yet like most of the rest of my relatives, she believes the war has been about fighting terrorism and deposing an evil dictator. Nothing I could say could convince her otherwise-although I did try.

I mentioned Saddam Hussein had actually once been an ally of the United States and that this had been back in the days when Ronald Reagan was president. This fact she had never heard of. I pressed harder on the issue.

"You remember when Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds?"

Yes, she remembered this.

"Where do you think he got his chemical weapons?" I asked.

She didn't know. When I told her it was from the United States it was almost as if a wall went up immediately between us. This was so contrary to-and so alien from-everything she had been told that I could see she simply wasn't buying it or accepting it.

I tried a different tact.

"You remember the war between Iran and Iraq?"

She did.

"Who do you think the United States supported in that war?"

"I don't know-Iraq?"

I replied that this was the case, but then I had to explain how and why this had come about which meant going into the Iranian revolution, the U.S. support for the shah, the shah's secret police, the Savak, the emergence of radical Islam, and so on-and by this time the conversation had gone pretty far afield.

How do you overcome years of conditioning to think in a certain way? I asked myself. What words do you choose?

I tried citing examples of "evil dictators" the U.S. had supported-the shah being a case in point. I also mentioned Suharto of Indonesia. The shah she rememberd; Suharto she had never heard of. I then told her about East Timor, and how 200,000 people had died there, and that all this had taken place with the blessings of Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger.

She listened, absorbing all this, without saying too much in reply. Did she believe what I was telling her? Did she believe even half of it? I have no idea. Somehow, even though she didn't say as much, I doubt it.

A few days earlier I had emailed to my sister, as well as to a couple of other close relatives, several articles on the Mad Cow story which I had gleaned from the Internet. I was hoping to get them to become vegetarian-as I have been for the past 14 years. I also figured what better way to illustrate the baseness and venality of those currently running the government? For what other story shows the lengths to which those we have entrusted will go to protect big business, even when it means deliberately exposing the public to an ominous health danger? Could any story currently in the news be more revealing of the utter callousness and indifference that exists within our "leaders" vis-à-vis ourselves, the people they are sworn to protect?

"Did you get the emails I sent you about mad cow disease?" I asked now.

She had, she replied, but she hadn't had time to read them yet.

I was stumped.

 

Weekend Edition Features for January 10 / 11, 2004

Alexander Cockburn
Bush as Hitler? Let's Be Fair

Susan Davis
Dangerous Books

Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell

Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past

Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq

Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety

Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?

Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List

Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost

Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War

Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry

Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?

Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common

Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike

Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page

Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball

Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon

Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert


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