home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links / feedback

New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: Cockburn on the Roadmap: It's a Big Hoax in a Long Line of Hoaxes; St. Clair on The Rat in the Grain: Daniel Amstutz and the Looting of the Farms of Iraq; All About David Horowitz: the Dazed and Confused Dirigible of the Right; Handicapping the Democrats: Will It be Graham vs. Dean?; Kucinich Wows Madison: But Seems to Have Forgotten the Horrors of Clintontime; Blumenthal v. Hitchens: Inside the Conspiracy; Merle Haggard Stays the Course: Country Legend Defends Dixie Chicks, Bashes Bush. 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! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Coming Soon! From Common Courage Press Recent Stories June 9, 2003 Alex Coolman Male Rape in US Prisons Elaine Cassel Ashcroft is Coming! Lee Sustar Is Iran Next? Agustin Velloso Equatorial Guinea: Few Rich, Many Poor Gila Svirsky Some Lives Are Worth Less Than Others Dr. Gerry Lower Human Worth in Bush's America Michael S. Ladah A True Liberation Ishmael Reed Iraqi Slaughter, Mayhem and Plunder Steve Perry How to Beat Bush, part 1   June 7 / 8, 2003 Alexander Cockburn The Terrible Truth Jeffrey St. Clair Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species Joanne Mariner Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers Steven Sherman A Different Theory of Everything Ron Jacobs Sports, Politics and the 60s M. Shahid Alam Pauperizing the Periphery Amelia Peltz If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost Shelton Hull Another Powell, Another Capitulation Binoy Kampmark Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea Ben Tripp A Fish Story Sen. Robert Byrd Where is the Outrage? Robin Philpot Congo Distortions Julie Hilden Murder and the Matrix Laura Flanders An Interview with Isabel Allende David Lindorff The Last Byline Adam Engel Talk Dirty Scary Monsters Poets' Basement Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod   June 6, 2003 Elaine Cassel Ashcroft the Insatiable David Krieger The Big Lie Ramzy Baroud Sharon and the Myth of the Peacemakers Anthony Gancarski Sharansky: "Crucifixion is a Privilege" Sam Hamod His Own Little Country Sean Carter Why Indict Martha Stewart and Not Ken Lay? David Lindorff Cracks in the Consensus Stew Albert Ari's Great Set Steve Perry Greens and Moore in 04? No   June 5, 2003 Jeffrey St. Clair Pools of Fire: The Looming Nuclear Nightmare in the Woods of North Carolina Imraan Siddiqi Ann Coulter's Foul Mouth Michael Leon Clinton, Reno & Waco: Remember What They've Done Robert Jensen Texas Pledge Law Undermines Democracy Ann Harrison Rosenthal is Free, But the Fight isn't Over Paul Dean How You Can Be Deliriously Happy in the Age of Bush Gary Leupp When Spooks Speak Out Website of the Day Evidence in Black and White?   June 4, 2003 Alexander Cockburn Federal Judge Blinks; Rosenthal Walks Lisa Walsh Thomas The Isaiah Crowd: The Threat of Neo-Christianity Jason Leopold Manufacturing the Iraq War John Chuckman Blackmail as Policy Mazin Qumsiyeh Summit: Peace or Pretense? Issam Nashashibi Sharon's Sword of Damocles Steve Perry Wolfowitz of Arabia: the VF interview transcript   June 3, 2003 Chris Floyd Copycat Killers: Bush, Jakarta and the Slaughter in Aceh Jason Leopold Wolfowitz Tells All Elaine Cassel We Interrupt Your Normal Show to Bring You an Important Message from Michael Powell: "Go to Hell, Americans!" Tom Crumpacker The Politics of US Cuba Policy William S. Lind Fourth Generation Warfare in Iraq Sam Hamod The Final Brick in the Wall Uri Avnery The Altalena Affair Hammond Guthrie Stepping into Some Deep DARPA Steve Perry The WashTimes' al-Qaeda nuke "exclusive" June 2, 2003 Arundhati Roy Day of the Jackals Norman Madarasz Behind the Neo-Con Curtain: Plato, Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom Alain Frachon and Daniel Vernet The Strategist and the Philosopher: Strauss and Wohlstetter Anthony Gancarski Anti-Imperialism, Then & Now Standard Schaefer Wasted at the Pentagon Jason Leopold Rocky's Advice to the Dems Guthrie & Albert HUAC 58 Years Letter Steve Perry The Politics of Terror Alerts   May 31, 2003 Alexander Cockburn A Whiner Called Horowitz Gary Leupp The Frauds of War Dave Lindorff Clinton, Bush, Lies and Impeachment Tom Stephens Does It Matter that the Bush Administration Lied? Sasan Fayazmanesh Who Is Next? Joanne Mariner Trivializing Terrorism Wayne Madsen Ayatollah Ashcroft's Busy Week Larry Magnuson Is a Television a Radio or a Billboard? Elaine Cassel Wake Up, America! Gila Svirsky Waiting for the Lament to End Susan Davis Kitchen Dreams Chris Clarke Barbra Streisand: Environmental Hypocrite Chris Floyd Bush Locates Source of World Evil: God Adam Engel Gravity's End Zone Poets' Basement Reiss, Guthrie, Orloski, Albert   May 30, 2003 Ben Tripp Crouching Tiger, Hidden Agenda Neve Gordon The Bad Fence Todd Steiner Endangered Ocean Robert Freeman Bush's Tax Cuts: a Form of National Insanity Sean Carter Utah Gets Fired Up for Executions Daniel Bacher How Bush's War Violated International Laws Tariq Ali Re-Colonizing Iraq Steve Perry Bush Wars Web Log   May 29, 2003 CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Jason Leopold Despite Thin Intelligence Reports, US Plans Overthrow of Iran Regime Ron Jacobs Popular Uprising, Inc. Michelle Ciaccorra Bush's Nuclear Policy: Do As I Say, Not As I Do Yves Engler The Economics of Health Care in America: Pay More to Die Sooner Kimberly Blaker Vouchers for Jesus Harry Browne Stakeknife: Britain's Army Spy at the Top of the IRA Stew Albert Cops of the World Steve Perry Greens 04: In or Out?       Hot Stories CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Elaine Cassel 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 Click Here for More Stories.   Subscribe Online Search CounterPunch

June 10, 2003 Revise and Conquer Bush Family Whitewashing in Iraq and Nazi Germany By CHRIS FLOYD Holocaust revisionism took decades to rear its ugly head, but the whitewashers of war crimes in the Bush Regime are trying to pervert the facts of history mere weeks after their Leader triumphantly declared "mission accomplished" in the war on Iraq. "Weapons of mass destruction?" Never heard of 'em. Never mentioned 'em. Maybe we'll find some. Not that important. Time to move on. Hey, how about a tax cut? But even as revisionist-in-chief George W. Bush was staging his somber photo-op in Auschwitz last week, the web of lies he and his little buddy Tony Blair concocted to "justify" launching an act of military aggression--on the very Hitlerian grounds of "preventive war"--was being shredded by their own intelligence services. In an unprecedented move, U.S and British spies went public to denounce the cartoonish manipulation of professional intelligence data by the war-hungry leaders. Reports of Saddam's "imminent threat" were "sexed up" on Blair's order, said UK spooks, while American agents said Bush was spoonfed a stew of uncorroborated confabulation by a "special team" of ideological hatchet-men overseen by Pentagon honcho Don Rumsfeld. Congressional and Parliamentary probes are now afoot. In the end, the "weapons of mass destruction" that the Christian Coalition had sworn were "armed and ready" to unleash unspeakable carnage on the world turned out to be--by Bush's own admission--a couple of trucks, which contained not a speck of hazardous material. Not exactly the fearsome arsenal the Dear Leader had invoked, in ever-increasing detail, throughout the long buildup to aggression. The actual CIA report which Bush cited was even more--or rather, less--revealing, noting that the trucks' designs were in fact consistent with their stated purpose: the production of hydrogen for weather balloons, Slate.com reports. Thus revisionism--panicky, cynical, maladroit--was the order of the day. Rumsfeld--whose smirking rictus of iron certainty was a mainstay of the drive to war--began backing off big-time. Maybe there ***weren't*** any WMD, he shrugged; maybe Saddam destroyed them before the war. Unfortunately, the UK press dug up a quote from St. Tony himself on the subject: "We are asked to accept Saddam decided to destroy those weapons. I say that such a claim is palpably absurd." But to be fair, Blair's broadside ***was*** fired long ago, practically in cave-man times: March 18, 2003, to be exact. It's certainly irrelevant in our go-go modern world, where history is written with water and each day is a new blank page. So it was most apt that the only question Bush was heard to ask during his Auschwitz tour actually dealt with Holocaust revisionism: "Do people challenge the accuracy of what you present?" he asked his guide, the New York Times reports. This might seem a rather bizarre question at first glance--but then, Bush has a personal stake in the cultivation of historical amnesia. His own family fortune was built in part by a long and profitable collusion with the Nazis--an ugly story oft told here, and raked up again by Newsweek Poland during the presidential visit. Bush's grandfather, Prescott Bush, and Prescott's father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, helped finance the rise of the Nazi Party through their intimate entanglements with Nazi industrial, shipping and banking interests. This long (and well-documented) collaboration continued even after America was at war with Nazi Germany. It seems the blood money was just too good to pass up--even if it had to be dug out of the corpses of young American soldiers and innocent civilians throughout Europe and North Africa. The Walker-Bush cabal's Nazi partners also helped finance--then profited from--the Auschwitz camp. Finally, in 1942, the U.S. government seized the Walker-Bush Nazi assets under the Trading With the Enemy Act. But the well-connected clan managed to bury the news in the back pages: brief mentions of the companies involved, but no names of the Establishment grandees behind them. They also pulled strings to keep their American assets from being seized as well, even though the profits from these enterprises were inextricably mixed with their Nazi loot. Prescott later cashed in these tainted assets for millions, a nest egg that helped launch him into the Senate and his son and grandson into the White House. So perhaps George Walker Bush felt uneasy treading on the bone-ash that lies beneath the soft, green grass of Auschwitz. Or perhaps not. For quietly buried in the back pages last week was news that the Walker-Bush tradition of war profiteering carries on. A small brief in the Financial Times revealed that Bush-connected "reconstruction" firms Halliburton and Bechtel, now in control of Iraq's oil fields, want to raise massive bank loans using future oil profits as collateral. In other words, these Establishment grandees will pocket billions in free money that will have to be paid back later by the Iraqi people, if and when their oil fields are returned. Both companies made millions with Saddam during the dictator's murderous heyday: Bechtel helped build Saddam's mustard-gas plants, while Halliburton, under Cheney, pocketed $73 million working with Saddam's UN-sanctioned regime after the first Gulf War. Meanwhile, Halliburton--which still pays Cheney a tidy annual sum--was handed yet another no-bid Iraq contract last week: $400 million in government grease this time. That's the way of the war profiteers, these men of "honor and integrity" who build their family fortunes, their corporate treasuries and their political dynasties on bone-ash. The grass they tread is always soft. Chris Floyd is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com Weekend Edition Features Alexander Cockburn The Terrible Truth Jeffrey St. Clair Going Critical: Bush's War on Endangered Species Joanne Mariner Ashcrofts Sides with Torturers Steven Sherman A Different Theory of Everything Ron Jacobs Sports, Politics and the 60s M. Shahid Alam Pauperizing the Periphery Amelia Peltz If This is the Road, I'd Rather be Lost Shelton Hull Another Powell, Another Capitulation Binoy Kampmark Nuclear Deterrence and North Korea Ben Tripp A Fish Story Sen. Robert Byrd Where is the Outrage? Robin Philpot Congo Distortions Julie Hilden Murder and the Matrix Laura Flanders An Interview with Isabel Allende David Lindorff The Last Byline Adam Engel Talk Dirty Scary Monsters Poets' Basement Kearney, Reiss, Guthrie, Albert and Hamod   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /