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New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: Cockburn on Judy Miller's War: Unnamed Sources, the Direct Line to Rummy, Timely Book Promotion; St. Clair on Bush's Main Man, Marc Racicot: Why Do They Call Him "the White Colin Powell"; What Did He Do to Montana?; JoAnn Wypijewski on the Supremes and Sodomy: It's a Sex Thing; FrankenFoods & World Hunger: More Crap from Monsanto; What's in a Name: Smith/Smythe and NPR. Remember, the CounterPunch website is supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide web audience is soaring, with more than 60,000 visitors a day. This is inspiring news, but the work involved also compels us to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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From Common Courage Press

Recent Stories

July 23, 2003

Uri Avnery
Caesar's Favor

July 22, 2003

Diane Christian
Bad Guy / Good Guy: War Forces; Peace Frees

Jeremy Brecher
Solidarity and Student Protests in Iran

Steve Kretzmann
and Jim Vallette
Plugging Iraq into Globalization

Sam Smith
Greening the Golden Triangle

James Plummer
Smile, You're on Federal Camera

Lucretia Stewart
This Day Shall Not Define My Life: January 18, 2003

Website of the Day
Iraq Coalition Casualties

 

July 21, 2003

Edward Said
Imperial Arrogance and the Vile Stereotyping of Arabs

Ron Jacobs
Shut Up and Shoot

Allan J. Lichtman
Why is George Bush President?

Elaine Cassel
How's the Occupation Going? Ask the People of Iraq

Christopher Brauchli
History Recapitulates: Guantanamo and the Japanese Internment Camps

Bruce Jackson
Third and Arizona, Santa Monica

Website of the Day
John Dean: Taking Apart Bush's State of the Union Speech, Claim by Claim

 

July 19 / 20, 2003

Arthur Mitzman
Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable Than the Dot.com Bubble?

Julian Bond
We Shall be Heard

Cynthia McKinney
Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad

Mel Goodman
What is to be Done with the CIA?

Jason Leopold
Tenet Blames Wolfowitz

Mickey Z.
History Forgave Churchill

Doug Giebel
Impeachment as the Message

Jon Brown
Whipping the Post

Mano Singham
Cheney's Oil Maps

Steven Sherman
Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC

Robin Philpot
Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters

Khaldoun Khelil
Capturing Friedman

Jeffrey St. Clair
You Must Leave Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed

Lenni Brenner
Sitting in with Mingus

Vanessa Jones
Three Dog Night

Adam Engel
Video Judas Video

Poets' Basement
Foley, Smith and Curtis

Website of the Weekend
Illegal Art

 

July 18, 2003

David Vest
Drowning in Deep Doo-Doo

Rahul Mahajan
Deceit Runs Deep

John Chuckman
Enron-style Management in a Dangerous World

Harold A. Gould
The Bush-Musharraf Conclave

Alvaro Angarita
In the Eye of the Storm: Colombia's War on Journalists

David Grenier
Sovereignty and Solidarity in Indian Country...Rhode Island

Dave Lindorff
Bush and Hitler: a Response to the Wall Street Journal

Website of the Day
Murder of a Whistleblower? Timeline in David Kelly Affair

 

July 17, 2003

Ron Jacobs
Sometimes Even the President of the United States Has to Stand Naked

Lisa Walsh Thomas
Bush Country: the Venom and Adulation of Ignorance

Martin Schwarz
Bush Pre-emptive Strike Doctrine is the Bane of Non-Proliferation Watchdogs

Heidi Lypps
Better Justice Through Chemistry? Forced Drugging and the Supreme Court

Norman Madarasz
Third Ways and Third Worlds: Lula at the Progressive Governance Conference

Pankaj Mehta
Criminalizing the Palestinian Solidarity Movement

Marjorie Cohn
Bush, War Lies & Impeachment: the Boy Who Cried Wolf

Hammond Guthrie
(Dis) Intelligence Revisited

Website of the Day
No Force, No Fraud: the Soul of Libertarianism

July 16, 2003

Jason Leopold
Wolfowitz Told White House to Hype Dubious Uranium Claims

William Cook
Defining Terrorism from the Top Down

Elaine Cassel
Judge Brinkema v. Ashcroft: She Whom Must Not Be Obeyed

Jason Leopold
How Can They Justify the War If WMDs Are Never Found?

Linda Heard
Bondage or Freedom?

Raymond Barrett
From Detroit to Basra

Jeffrey St. Clair
Back to the Future in Guatemala: The Return of Gen. Ríos Montt

 

July 15, 2003

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Why We Resigned from VIPS

Elaine Cassel
Ashcroft's War on Legal Whistleblowers: the Ordeal of Jesselyn Radack

Chris Floyd
Barge Poles: Oil Wars and New Europe's Mercenaries

Jason Leopold
CIA Warned White House Last October that Niger Docs were Forgeries

Gaius Publius
Considering the Obvious: Fool Us Once, Fool Us Twise...Please

John Troyer
The Niger Syndrome

Becky Gillette
No Conspiracy at Coffeen Nature Preserve: a Response to David Orrr

Uri Avnery
The Bi-National State: The Wolf Shall Dwell with the Lamb

Website of the Day
Cost of Iraq War

 

July 14, 2003

Lisa Taraki
Hot Days in Ramallah

Walter Brasch
Bush: the Pretend Captain

SOA Watch
Training Colombia's Killers in the US

Dan Bacher
Yurok Tribe Denounces Klamath River Salmon Killers

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
Intelligence Unglued

Website of the Day
Coalition for Democratic Rights and Civil Liberties


July 12 / 13, 2003

Arthur Mitzman
The Double Wall Before the Future

Standard Schaefer
The Coming Financial Reality: an Interview with Michael Hudson

John Feffer
A Fearful Symmetry: Washington and Pyongyang

Ron Jacobs
Shades of Gray in Iran

Elaine Cassel
Judicial Terrorism Against the Bill of Rights

Tom Stephens
Civil Liberties After 9/11

David Lindorff
New White House Slogan: "Case Closed. Just Move On"

Jason Leopold
The Mini-War Against Iraq Prior to 9/11

Lee Sustar
What's Behind the Crisis in Liberia?

Mickey Z.
AIDS Dissent and Africa

Sam Hamod
Semitic is a Language Group, Not a Race or Ethnic Group

Ramzy Baroud
Awaiting Justice on an Old Blanket

Jeffrey St. Clair
Savage Incongruities: the Photographic Life of Lee Miller

Adam Engel
Parable of the Lobbyist

Robert Sanders
A Review of Ralph Lopez's American Dream

Poets' Basement
Albert, Witherup, Guthrie

 

July 11, 2003

Conn Hallinan
The Coin of Empire

Tim Wise
God Responds to Bush

Mokhiber / Weissman
The Two Faces of Bush in Africa

Edward S. Herman
Whitewashing Sandra Day O'Connor

David Orr
Coffeen-gate: What's Going on at the Sierra Club Foundation?

David Lindorff
An Iraq War & Occupation Glossary

Website of the Day
Dead Malls

 

July 10, 2003

Ron Jacobs
Dealing with the Devil: the Bloody Profits of General Dynamics

Sean Donahue
Bush and the Paramillitaries: Coddling Terrorists in Colombia

Yemi Toure
Who Outted Bush in Afrika?

Robert Jensen
Politics and Sustainability: an Interview with Wes Jackson

Ali Abunimah
US Leaves Injured Iraqis Untreated

Joanne Mariner
Federal Courts, Not Military Commissions

Website of the Day
Electronic Iraq

 

July 9, 2003

David Lindorff
Is the Media Finally Turning on Bush?

David Krieger and Angela McCracken
10 Myths About Nuclear Weapons

Mickey Z.
Why Speak Out?

Lee Sustar
The Great Medicare Fraud

John Chuckman
The Worst Kind of Lie

Gary Leupp
"Pacifist" Japan and the Occupation of Iraq

Website of the Day
Hail to the Thief:
Songs for the Bush Years

 

July 8, 2003

Elaine Cassel
Bully on the Bench: the Pathological Dissents of Scalia

Alan Maass
Nights of Fire and Rage in Benton Harbor

Chris Floyd
Troubled Sleep: Getting Used to the American Gulag

Linda S. Heard
America's Kangaroo Justice

Brian Cloughley
They Tell Lies to Nodders

Charles Sullivan
Bush the Christian?

Saul Landau
The Intelligence Culture in the National Security Age

Website of the Day
Occupation Watch

 

July 7, 2003

William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report

Harvey Wasserman
The Nuke with a Hole in Its Head

Ramzy Baroud
Peace for All the Wrong Reasons

Simon Jones
What Progressives Should Think About Iran

Lesley McCulloch
Fear, Pain and Shame in Aceh

Uri Avnery
The Draw

Steve Perry
Bush's Wars Web Log 7/3

 

July 4 / 6, 2003

Patrick Cockburn
Dead on the Fourth of July

Frederick Douglass
What is Freedom to a Slave?

Martha Honey
Bush and Africa: Racism, Exploitation and Neglect

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Rat in the Grain: Amstutz and the Looting of Iraqi Agriculture

Standard Schaefer
Rule by Fed: Anyone But Greenspan in 2004

Lenni Brenner
Jefferson is for Today

Elaine Cassel
Fucking Furious on the Fourth

Ben Tripp
How Free Are We?

Wayne Madsen
A Sad Independence Day

John Stanton
Happy Birthday, America! 227 Years of War

Jim Lobe
Bush's Surreal AIDS Appointment

John Blair
Return to Marble Hill: Indiana's Rusting Nuke

Lisa Walsh Thomas
Heavy Reckoning at Qaim

David Vest
Wake Up and Smell the Dynamite

Adam Engel
Queer as Grass

Poets' Basement
Christian, Witherup, Albert & St. Clair

Website of the Weekend
The Lipstick Librarian

 

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A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From

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Civil Liberties Watch

Michel Guerrin
Embedded Photographer Says: "I Saw Marines Kill Civilians"

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

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July 23, 2003

Killing Qusay and Uday

The Sons are Dead, But Resistance Will Grow

By ROBERT FISK

So they are dead. Or are they? Even Baghdad exploded in celebratory, deafening automatic rifle fire at the news.

The burned, bullet-splashed villa in Mosul, the four bullet-ridden corpses, America's hopes--however vain--that the death of Saddam Hussein's two sons, Uday and Qusay, will break the guerrilla resistance to Iraq's US occupation troops, all conspired to produce an illusion last night: that the unidentified bodies found after a four-hour gun battle between Iraqi gunmen and US forces must be those of the former dictator's sons--because the world wants them to be.

Of course, they might be dead. The two men are said to bear an impressive resemblance to the brothers. A 14-year-old child killed by the Americans--one of the four dead--might be one of Saddam's grandsons. The house was owned by Mohamed el-Zidani, a tribal ally of the Husseins.

Qusay was a leader of the Special Republican Guard, a special target of the Americans. The two men obviously fought fiercely against the 200 American troops who surrounded the house. The Americans used their so-called Task Force 20 to storm the pseudo-Palladian villa on a main highway through Mosul.

Task Force 20 combines both special forces and CIA agents. But this is the same Task Force 20 that blasted to death the occupants of a convoy heading for the Syrian border earlier this month, a convoy whose travellers were meant to include Saddam himself and even the two sons supposedly killed yesterday. The victims turned out to be only smugglers.

And American intelligence--the organisation that failed to predict events of 11 September, 2001--was also responsible for the air raid on a Saddam villa on 20 March, which was supposed to kill Saddam. And the far crueller air raid on the Mansour district of Baghdad at the end of the air bombardment in April which was supposed to kill Saddam and his sons but only succeeded in slaughtering 16 innocent civilians. All proved to be miserable failures.

And in a family obsessed, with good reason, with their own personal security, would Uday and Qusay really be together? Would they allow themselves to be trapped. The two so-called "lions of Iraq" (this courtesy of Saddam) in the very same cage?

Saddam's early life was spent on the run. But he always travelled alone. In adversity, the family had learned to stay apart, just as they had during the 1991 Gulf War and during last March's invasion of Iraq. Even in power, Saddam and his sons were in hiding. Even if DNA testing proves that the corpses are those of Saddam's sons, will Iraqis believe it? And will it bring the guerrilla war to an end?

Firstly, even if Uday and Qusay are dead, Saddam is clearly still alive.

Though Uday was both a cruel man and a psychopath, they were appendages to the king, mere assistants in the monster's cave. Saddam lives. And his voice is still heard on tape throughout Iraq. It is his fate of which Iraqis are waiting to hear.

Secondly, and far more importantly, there is a fundamental misunderstanding between the American occupation authorities in Iraq and the people whose country they are occupying. The United States believes that the entire resistance to America's proconsulship of Iraq is composed of "remnants" of Saddam's followers, "dead-enders", "bitter-enders"--they have other phrases to describe them. Their theory is that once the Hussein family is decapitated, the resistance will end.

But the guerrillas who are killing US troops every day are also being attacked by a growing Islamist Sunni movement which never had any love for Saddam. Much more importantly, many Iraqis were reluctant to support the resistance for fear that an end to American occupation would mean the return of the ghastly old dictator.

If he and his sons are dead, the chances are that the opposition to the American-led occupation will grow rather than diminish--on the grounds that with Saddam gone, Iraqis will have nothing to lose by fighting the Americans.

Robert Fisk is a reporter for The Independent and author of Pity the Nation. He is also a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's forthcoming book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism.


Weekend Edition Features for July 19 / 20, 2003

Arthur Mitzman
Will the Pax Americana be More Sustainable Than the Dot.com Bubble?

Julian Bond
We Shall be Heard

Cynthia McKinney
Bush's Racial Politics at Home and Abroad

Mel Goodman
What is to be Done with the CIA?

Jason Leopold
Tenet Blames Wolfowitz

Mickey Z.
History Forgave Churchill

Doug Giebel
Impeachment as the Message

Jon Brown
Whipping the Post

Mano Singham
Cheney's Oil Maps

Steven Sherman
Nickle, Dimed and Slimed at UNC

Robin Philpot
Liberia: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, It Stutters

Khaldoun Khelil
Capturing Friedman

Jeffrey St. Clair
You Must Leave Home, Again: Gilad Atzmon's A Guide to the Perplexed

Lenni Brenner
Sitting in with Mingus

Vanessa Jones
Three Dog Night

Adam Engel
Video Judas Video

Poets' Basement
Foley, Smith and Curtis

Website of the Weekend
Illegal Art

 

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