How
the Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
Today's
Stories
January 19,
2005
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Toture
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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.
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January 19, 2005
Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Marines
Stretching Movement
By
MIKE FERNER
No, this is not a military-oriented
guide to keeping fit. Yet it has made some people uncomfortable
if not downright sore.
It's about the peace movement
and how a U.S. Marine company using downtown Toledo for "urban
warfare" training provided an opportunity for activists
to think and act beyond normal limits.
With barely a week's notice,
an article in the local paper announced that a weapons company
of the 1st Battalion, 24th Marine Reserves would spend a weekend
running around our downtown, honing combat skills by firing blanks
at imaginary enemies. The North West Ohio Peace Coalition (NWOPC)
and local Veterans for Peace (VFP) designed a response, different
from what many in the peace movement had seen or that some were
even comfortable with.
That response was:
A message written for the Toledo
Marines by VFP member and retired Special Forces Master Sergeant,
Stan Goff. He compared the lies leading up to his first combat
assignment, Viet Nam, with Iraq, urging the soldiers to "reflect
on what you are doing and what you are about to doyou yourselves
must carry the burden of the memoriesif you decide that you have
to chart a different course with your life, we have contact information
for those who can helpwe have a whole community of veterans and
military families who will welcome you with open arms and our
support."
"Cadence" chants
written by VFP members around the country. Banners and picket
signs with messages like, "We love you. Stay home,"
"Support the troops, keep them home,"and "Bush
and Cheney lied; soldiers died." Oversized portraits of
Iraqi civilians and war casualties. A sound truck playing Edwin
Starr's rock classic, "War!"
For two hours late Friday night,
as the Marines set up their weekend command post in (believe
it or not) an abandoned center for selling blood plasma, 30 peace
activists stood with banners, signs, photos, and "War,"
Goff's message and cadence chants alternating over the P.A.
Negotiations with the Toledo police got us only as close as the
opposite side of the street, so an artificial gulf kept us from
reading soldiers' expressions or hearing their responses that
would have only been whispered under doubtless orders against
"fraternizing" with us. One of our band, chafed by
the order not to use a public sidewalk on a public street, crossed
the thoroughfare to make a point and was promptly arrested.
The next day a dozen activists
returned with signs, photos, banners, "War," and a
bullhorn for Goff's letter, ready to peacefully engage squads
of Marines who had come to engage "enemies" in parking
garages and alleys.
With the mobile "War"
unit circling the blocks, broadcasting the song to the Marines,
the activists on foot followed one detachment past the main library,
singing out a whole list of VFP cadences.
The most familiar chant was:
"Hey, hey Uncle Sam/We remember Viet Nam/We don't want
your I-raq war/Peace is what we're marchin' for. Am I right
or wrong (You're right!). Am I right or wrong? (You're right!)"
But the most popular was: "Dubya's lies should make
him choke/He must still be snortin' coke/Saddam's secret poison
gas/Must be something Rumsfeld passed."
In front of the Family Courts
building, the Marines regrouped and rested momentarily, presenting
a perfect opportunity to read Goff's message again. As the Reserves
began to move out in pairs, guns pointed in all directions, the
words of the Special Forces veteran echoed off the court building,
clear as a bell:
"Vietnam was a war that
was not possible to win. You will find that Iraq is the same.
Winning is not measured by who can cause the most death and
pain. And winning is not measured by tactical victories over
locations you have no intention of holding. The ultimate outcome
of any war is political, and that war has already been lost.
So your Commander in Chief is now sending you out to kill others,
to wound others, to destroy the homes and livelihoods of others,
or to be killed or wounded by others, to pursue a goal that was
never just, and is now lost."
Back at the blood plasma/command
post, the peace activists gathered to say goodbye with an impromptu
addition from one of the group, a high school English teacher,
interested in delivering a message of Christian love.
Describing Christ as an outspoken
critic of the occupying Roman Army, he referred to the command
to "love your enemies" as ultimately an act of self
protection, one that could interrupt the cycle of violence.
He ended with the Golden Rule and an exhortation to the Marines
to "think for yourself."
The next day two email messages
stood out against the usual inbox clutter.
One was from a local VFP member
who, as a 15 year-old was drafted into the German Army in the
closing days of WWII, then emigrated to the U.S. just in time
to be drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to Korea. He wrote:
"Our troops are in Iraq engaged in an illegal war and they
are there to kill IraqisAt the Nuremberg war crimes trial, the
Nazi war criminals who perpetrated the kind of illegal aggression
that we are now guilty of against Iraq were found guilty and
hanged. The soldiers who carried out these crimes against the
civilian population were also found guilty. The fact that they
followed orders was not then an admissible defense, nor should
it be nowSome of us think if we just pay lip service to the idea
of supporting our troops in time of war, we will be less severely
criticized by the super patriots as being unpatriotic. It won't
work and it distorts our purpose of calling an end to an illegal,
murderous invasion of another country."
Another was from a University
of Toledo student, a veteran of picket lines and civil disobedience
arrests, who asked "Why exactly do we support the troops?Activists
have said the troops are fighting willingly in an unjust warthe
likelihood of us changing the minds of the Republican troops
is about the same as Karl Rove convincing us to become neo-conservative."
Added to those critiques is
the following anecdote. Walking downtown the day after the protest,
a City streets worker dashed across the road to shake my hand
and say, "thanks for what you're doing to get our troops
home."
That comment represented the
kind of response I hoped our message would elicit from the "persuadable
middle" of public opinion. The response I hoped for from
young soldiers was based on what I remembered as a teenager during
the Viet Nam war.
In those volatile days I alternated
between being a conscientious objector and following John Wayne's
example of serving my country joining the Marines to fight
the commies. Remembering those days, it was easy to put myself
in the place of young reservists, quite possibly bound for Iraq,
and wonder if any of them were similarly conflicted. My hope
was that a compassionate message, delivered in familiar language,
might be heard by one of the Marines beginning to ask "what
the hell am I doing here?" Falling on fertile ground, the
message might grow into a decision by one of the reservists,
or a local GI who saw us on the 6 o'clock news last weekend,
to join the growing number of soldiers refusing to fight in Iraq.
This leads to the larger question
of whether the peace movement can ethically construct a message
and deliver it at appropriate times that is not about
how we feel about the war, but how soldiers and our neighbors
in the persuadable middle feel about it? It's high time we undertook
this discussion.
Mike Ferner is a former Navy Hospital Corpsman
and a member of Veterans for Peace. He spent three months in
Iraq, before and after the U.S. invasion, and is writing a book
about his experiences. He can be reached at: mike.ferner@sbcglobal.net
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