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Today's
Stories
March 26, 2004
Chris Floyd
The Pentagon Archipelago
Website of the Day
Dick
is a Killer
March 25, 2004
Lee Sustar
Who
is to Blame for Lost Jobs?
Standard Schaefer
An
Interview with Michael Hudson on Offshore Banking Centers
Roger Burbach
Lula vs. the IMF: Brazil Begins
to Throw Off the Austerity Planners
Jimmer Endres
Elections Without Politics: The Military Budget Is Not an "Issue"
Larry Tuttle
Acting in Your Name: Identity Theft and Public Interest Groups
Toni Solo
Misreporting Venezuela
Dan Bacher
A Memorial Wall for Iraq War's Dead and Wounded
Saul Landau
Is
Venezuela Next?
Website of the Day
The Spiral Railway
March 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
General
Musharraf's IOU
Richard Oxman
Shakespeare
for Kerry
William Lind
The Beginning
of Phase Three: 4G Warfare Hits Iraq
Rep. Ron Paul
Iraq One Year Later
Michael Dempsey
Killing Rachel Corrie Again
Alan Farago
The Bad Math of Mercury: Bush's War on the Unborn
Benjamin Dangl
and April Howard
Media
in Cuba
John L. Hess
No Lie Left Behind: Judy Miller Does Dick Clarke
Greg Weiher
Two Cheers for Dems: "We're Not as Bad as George"
Eva Golinger
An Open Letter to John Kerry on Venezuela
Grayson Childs
Where's Cynthia McKinney?
Steve Niva
Israel's Assassinations will Only
Fuel More Suicide Bombings
Website of the Day
The Bushiad and the Idiossey
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The
Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's National Parks
Ron Jacobs
They Shoot Men in Wheelchairs, Too?
Dave Lindorff
A Spanish Parallel: Scare Tactics and Elections
Mike Whitney
Richard Clarke and Teflon George
Brian McKinlay
Bush's Lil' Buddy in Trouble: John Howard Starts to Wobble
JG
Driving Mr. Koon: "Jim Crow Lives Next Door"
Phyllis Pollack
Gettin' Jigga with Metallica: the Battle Over the Double Black
CD
Ahmed Bouzid
Sharon's One-Way Track
Sean Carter
The G-Word Goes to Court: One Nation Under [Your Logo Here]
M. Shahid Alam
World's Greatest Country: Do the Facts Lie
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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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March
26, 2004
The Pentagon Archipelago
Down
and Out in Guantanamo
By CHRIS FLOYD
This is the story of three innocent men, held
in brutal captivity for more than two years; three innocent men,
stripped, blinded, beaten, tortured, caged and silenced, all
in the name of freedom and civilization; three innocent men,
ground into the dust by an implacable power that defends its
"enduring moral values" with the boot in the groin,
the gun to the head--and the abetting of atrocity and murder.
It's the story of three Britons released
this month from the U.S. concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba--26 months after they began their progress through the guts
of the Pentagon Archipelago, the chain of American detention
camps and secret "interrogation centers" that now encircle
the earth. In a remarkable interview with David Rose of The Observer--a
pro-war UK paper--Shafiq Rasul, Ruhal Ahmed and Asif Iqbal from
the middle England town of Tipton told the tale of their ordeal
in the Bush Regime's legal purgatory.
(But first--who says these guys are innocent?
They're Muslims, ain't they? They were captured by God's own
soldiers in the devil land of Afghanistan, weren't they? As President
Bush's new campaign ads have reminded us, every Ayrab-looking
swarthian out there is a card-carrying terrorist minion of Osama
bin Kerry unless proven otherwise by the proper authorities,
right? So who exactly has cleared these men of all charges? Well,
let's see: the CIA, the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency,
MI5, MI6, London's Metropolitan Police, and the governments of
the United States and Great Britain. Will that do?)
The three men, lifelong friends in their
early twenties, went to Pakistan in September 2001 for Iqbal's
wedding. The following month, as Afghanistan's civil war flared
under the shadow of the impending American attack, the friends
joined Muslim relief efforts in war-ravaged Afghan villages.
As avowed moderates, they were under constant threat from the
Taliban--the virulent extremists who'd been armed, funded and
sustained in power by U.S. ally Pakistan and the Bush Family's
business partners in Saudi Arabia.
When American bombs started falling,
the friends tried to flee the country. But they were trapped
in Kunduz with thousands of refugees when the city fell to <U.S.-backed>
warlord Rashid Dostum, a former Soviet collaborator turned jihadnik.
Known for his macabre punishments--he liked to see his victims
torn apart by tanks--Dostum fell upon the surrendered masses
with his wonted fury. Thousands died on a death march through
the mountains to Shebargan, where Dostum linked up with U.S.
Special Forces. There, the captives, including the Tipton men,
were packed by the hundreds into metal truck trailers, where
they were left for days to suffocate and die. Fires were lit
under some of the trailers, roasting those trapped inside. Of
the 35,000 who left Kunduz, only 4,500 remained alive.
The survivors were crammed into Shebargan's
open-air prison, where they continued to die in droves--as U.S.
forces watched coolly from the perimeter. Finally, the three
friends were sent to an American camp in Kandahar, where, hooded
and chained, they were "processed": stripped, rectally
probed, beaten, forced to kneel for hours, naked, their necks
pressed to the floor by a guard's boot. Then came the first "interrogation":
again kneeling, chained, with beatings and kicking followed by
questioning--as an agent stood on the back of their legs, pressing
a pistol to their heads. This routine went on for weeks. The
only relief came when British spies appeared for a session: "Don't
worry, they won't beat you while we're here," the jolly
James Bonds would say. At night, there were head counts every
hour to prevent the prisoners from sleeping, and periodic shakedowns
of their tents, which were open at all times to the winter weather.
Months later, for reasons unexplained--probably
a false confession beaten out of someone else down the line,
throwing out names of "accomplices" to sate the voracious
interrogators--the Tipton men were frog-marched onto a plane
bound for Cuba, triple-chained and beaten along the way, beaten
and kicked upon their arrival. Then began the long, dazed, limbo-life
of Guantanamo. Endless interrogations: each man was grilled at
least 200 times, sometimes for 12 hours at a stretch, always
kneeling, chained to the floor. Constant punishments: for "backtalk,"
or seeking privacy for their bowel movements, or arranging their
utensils incorrectly. And always, over and over, the farcical
accusations that could have easily been disproved with five minutes
of investigation.
But their captors weren't interested
in the truth; they wanted "results." Finally, after
two years of relentless physical and psychological pressure--including
the ever-present threat of a military tribunal and execution
without appeal--the friends cracked and signed false confessions
to the most ludicrous charge of all: that they were top bin Laden
lieutenants, pictured with him in a video from August 2000, despite
the existence of documentary evidence--witnesses, pay stubs,
school records--that proved they were in England at the time.
But before their show trial could begin, British intelligence
belatedly examined the charge and confirmed the alibis of all
three men.
Now they're free, as the Regime flushes
the most embarrassing cases out of the system before the Supreme
Court rules on the "legality" of the Bush gulag this
summer. The treatment of these three innocent men, chained and
beaten for two years, is not just a crime, but also--like that
other crime, the invasion of Iraq--an enormous waste of time
and resources in the "war on terrorism." We saw the
grim fruit of this waste in Madrid on March 11.
But of course, the Pentagon Archipelago
wasn't designed to fight terrorism; it's designed to advance
terrorism--state terrorism. Its purpose is to establish the principle
of arbitrary rule--in the name of "military necessity"--above
the rule of law, in America and around the world. It's part of
an overarching system of terror--aggressive war, assassination,
indefinite detention, torture--employed to achieve the Regime's
openly-stated ideological goal: "full spectrum dominance"
of global politics and resources, particularly energy resources.
Al Qaeda has the same goal, and uses the same methods, albeit
on a smaller, "asymmetrical" scale.
Now we are all at the mercy of these
entwined terrorist factions--both led by fundamentalist sons
of two financially linked elitist clans. We will see more Guantanamos,
more Madrids, before this long, dark night is over.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. His CounterPunch piece on Rumsfeld's
plan to provoke terrorist attacks came in at Number 4
on Project Censored's final tally of the Most Censored stories
of 2002. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
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