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May 24, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
Bush
Administration Scandals:
Beginning of the End?
Feingold / Corzine
Halt Executions Nationwide
Bill Christison
Former
CIA Analyst:
Big Changes Needed in
US Intelligence Agencies
May 23, 2002
Dean Baker
Attack of the Clowns:
The Real Bush is Back
Susan Abulhawa
Israel
and South Africa:
Apartheid's Accidental Prophecy
Uri Avnery
Sharon the Great Reformer?
Behzad Yaghmaian
Travails
of a Middle Eastern Migrant: Accosted at the Border
May 22, 2002
Brian J. Foley
Dick Cheney's Obscenity
Gavin Keeney
Bete Noire
Enron & the Great Game
Fran Shor
Follow the Money
Bush, bin Laden & Carlyle
May 21, 2002
George Monbiot
Riddle
of the Spores:
The FBI and Anthrax
Yulie Khromchenko
Displaced Reality:
Impressions from Jenin
Bernard Weiner
Kenny
Boy to Bush:
"Welcome to the Club"
Ron Jacobs
Confusing the Face
of the Enemy
Gary Leupp
"War
on Terrorism" in Yemen
May 20, 2002
Rep. Ron Paul
Say No to Military Draft
Dave Marsh
Music Monopolies
Jordy Cummings
Israel, Jews and the Left
Francis Boyle
In Defense
of a Divestment
Campaign Against Israel
Christian Salmon
The Bulldozer War
Edward Said
Crisis for
American Jews
May 19, 2002
Philip Farruggio
Where's Twain's Protector Government
Now?
Norman Madarasz
Canada,
NAFTA and Kyoto
May 18, 2002
M.G. Piety
Economic Fiction:
From Here to Annuity?
Michael Colby
Bush Fiddled
While
New York Burned
May 17, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Fox News Flashback:
Defending McKinney
James T. Phillips
Ceasefires
and Terrorists
Phillipe Dambournet
The Truth at Last:
Bush as the Energizer Bunny
Lori Berenson
In Defense
of Political Prisoners
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Terrorist Warnings
Hussein Ibish
Clarifying
the Obstacles
to Peace in Palestine
Alexander Cockburn
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
May 16, 2002
Marylin Robinson
A Garden
in Tent City, But Where Do You Bathe?
Paul de Rooij
Worse than CNN?
The BBC and Israel
David Krieger
The Bush/Putin
Agreement:
Nuclear Dangers Remain
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
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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 New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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
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The
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Al Gore:
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May
24, 2002
Unmasking Colin
Powell
General Principles
by Chris
Floyd
Quietly, without fanfare, in a bland statement
issued by its most "moderate" front man, the Bush Regime
crossed another moral Rubicon last week, carrying the once-great
republic they have usurped deeper into the blood-soaked mire
of international criminality.
The move--committing the United States
of America to a policy of Hitlerian military aggression--was
little noted at the time. A quick soundbite, maybe, on a couple
of the more wonky TV news shows; a brief quote buried somewhere
in the thick gray sludge of the "serious" papers. The
Regime guaranteed its poison pill would go down sugarcoated by
picking Secretary of State Colin Powell as its mouthpiece.
It was a masterstroke of propaganda,
really. The former general has long been regarded by the "serious"
media on both sides of the Atlantic as a "moderate"
maverick on Bush's hard-right team. Liberal commentators praise
Powell as a "restraining influence" on more bellicose
insiders like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and a wise, guiding hand for
a president unschooled in the subtleties of world diplomacy.
It's all a sham, of course. Powell is
nothing more than a lifelong bagman for powerful interests. His
willingness to play ball, to look the other way, has made him
a convenient tool for the some of the most violent and undemocratic
forces ever to pollute American society.
His first job on the Inside was an attempted
whitewash of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam; it didn't quite
work, but he won points for his obfuscatory efforts and went
on to a plum job in the crime-ridden, Mob-connected Nixon White
House. Then came Iran-Contra, the criminal conspiracy of drug-running
and terrorism operated directly out of the Reagan-Bush White
House. Powell illicitly sent missiles to the terrorist regime
of Ayatollah Khomeini, then helped with the ensuing cover-up.
For this service, he was made head of the entire U.S. military.
He then directed the illegal American
aggression against Panama, when President George H.W. Bush killed
hundreds of innocent civilians in a hissy fit against his old
CIA employee Manuel Noreiga. Powell, like Bush, had long known
Noreiga was a murderous drug dealer, but they found him useful,
and plied him with plaudits and cash--until Bush needed to prove
his tough-guy cojones to Reaganite critics in the Republican
Party.
Now Powell serves faithfully as a water-carrier
for the rabid rightists in Bush Junior's crew. Powell breaks
bread with John Ashcroft, who breaks bread with the avowed racists
at Southern Partisan magazine, who break bread with extremists
who call for concentration camps, expulsions and executions for,
among many others, African-Americans. It doesn't bother Powell.
He's never made a public moral stand against any hard-right lunacy
advocated by his bosses and their cronies. He just follows orders.
He's a General Jodl for the 21st century.
So what better man to announce George
W. Bush's adoption of Adolf Hitler's moral code? Powell sat down
with the media sycophants on ABC's "This Week" and
calmly--moderately -- laid out the new doctrine. The subject,
of course, was Iraq. The UN was working on a deal that would
allow international inspectors back into the country to verify
that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction.
These inspections were vital because,
as George W. never ceases to remind us, Saddam Hussein is so
evil that he "gassed his own people." And he most certainly
did. But Junior always omits the inconvenient fact that one year
after Hussein killed 100,000 Iraqi Kurds, Daddy Bush signed an
executive order mandating closer U.S. ties to Saddam's regime.
Daddy Bush showered Saddam with endless financial credits and
mountains of "dual-use technology"--which the dictator
duly used to develop his WMDs--right up until the day before
Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Needless to say, Powell, as head of
Daddy's military, was complicit in this lunatic operation and
raised no demur, "moderate" or otherwise.
Flash forward to the present day. Junior
Bush in the White House now. For months, he has threatened military
action against Iraq if Hussein fails to verify the destruction
of his WMD capacity. (At the same time, of course, Junior undercuts
international treaties that would require monitoring of his own
biochemical warfare facilities. There's a good reason for that:
the Regime is now preparing to develop offensive biochemical
weapons, in contravention of international and U.S. law, the
Village Voice reports.)
The world braces for another conflagration
in the Mesopotamian sands. But then Saddam blinks. He starts
talking with the UN. He renounces aggression. He makes up with
Kuwait. Sooner or later, the inspectors will go back in--no cause
for war now, right?
Wrong, Powell told the sycophants last
week. The "moderate" secretary said that even if UN
inspectors go in and verify compliance, the Bush Regime still
"reserves its options" to do anything necessary, including
military invasion, to effect a "regime change." Bush
himself has already acknowledged that nuclear force is among
those "options."
So there it is. The United States now
openly claims the right to launch an all-out attack on any nation
in the world whose regime it doesn't like--even if that nation
is not engaged in active military aggression or terrorism--and
even if the mere threat of aggression has been defused by UN
monitoring.
No provocation necessary. No legality
required. Just a thuggish elite raining death on the world, for
profit and power, sowing hatred for the once-great nation they
have hijacked--and ensuring more death and terror for its people.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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