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September 9, 2002
Alan Maass
What's
Missing from Springsteen's The Rising
Jack McCarthy
Karl
Rove's War
Mokhiber and Weissman
Advertise
This!
Robert Jensen
Still
Time to Stop the Insanity
Rania Awwad
Ethnic
Cleansing by Starvation
September 7 / 8, 2002
Bill Christison
A
Year Later: It's Happening Here
Alexander Cockburn
The
Tenth Crusade
Susan Davis
Mr. Ashcroft's
Neighborhood
Bruce Jackson
When
War Came Home
David Krieger
Looking
Back on September 11
Mike Leon
Bush and War
Peter Linebaugh
Levellers
and 9/11
William McDougal
September 11 One Year On:
That's Entertainment!
Riad Z. Abdelkarim and Jason Erb
How American Muslims Really Responded
to 9/11
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Trouble
with Normal
Tom Stephens
Rise Up...Dump Bush
Kurt Nimmo
War Talk
in the Post Office
September 6, 2002
Sadanand Nanjundiah
Hanan
Ashrawi in Colorado:
Another Smear Campaign
Gary Webb
CIA, Contras
and Crack
Dark Alliance Restored
Neve Gordon
Bush's
Wars Undermine Democracy
Maria Engqvist
Colombia's
War on Unions
The Coca-Cola Killings
John Stanton
The Ministry
of Fear:
The Department of Homeland Security
Jeffrey St. Clair
Stolen
Trust
Gale Norton, Indians and the Case of the Missing $10 Billion
September 5, 2002
Ben Tripp
Jesus vs.
George the Second
William Hughes
McKinney's
Defeat:
Undue Meddling
Gavin Keeney
Beaux
Reves, Citoyens!
Wayne Saunders
War
Begins; Nobody Notices
Irit Katriel
Drunk
with Power:
Israeli Chief of Staff Calls Palestinians a "Cancerous Demographic
Threat"
Gary Leupp
Who's Afraid
of Iraq?
September 4, 2002
Sam Bahour
Perfecting
the Violence of Curfew: Parents, Children and the Israeli Lockdown
David Krieger & Marissa
Zubia
Top 10
Reasons to Oppose Yucca Mountain Dump
Steen Sohn
Wiretapping
Journalists
Robert Jensen
Rape is
"Normal"
Mokhiber and Weissman
Thirsty
for Justice
The Rush to Privatize Water
George Monbiot
Trouble
in the Pipeline
Kathleen Christison
Thomas
Friedman Bashes
the Palestinians...Again!
September 3, 2002
Bernard Weiner
The Charnel
House Future
Why Bush & Co Must be Stopped
Anthony Gancarski
America
Strikes Back
Lynchings, Zionists and the Occasional Flag Tie
Nabil Amro
Leadership
& Legitimacy:
An Open Letter to Arafat
Robert Fisk
A Forgotten
Holocaust:
The British in Palestine
Uri Avnery
The Return
of the Dinosaurs
September 2, 2002
Francis Boyle
Flashback:
US War Crimes During the Gulf War
Lou Cohan
Confessions
of a Downloader
Philip Farruggio
Labor
Day Antidote to Apathy
William Blum
Cuban Political
Prisoners
in the US
September 1, 2002
Dave Marsh
No Surrender:
Springsteen's The Rising
August 31, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Return to the Charterhouse
of Parma
David Vest
Porkland:
Confronting Republicans & Police in Portland
Ralph Nader
The Highway
Lobby
M. Shahid Alam
CNN Reporting
(poem)
Neve Gordon
Sharon's
Subjugation Strategy
Dr. Susan Block
The Gangbang
Asthete
The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
Jensen / Mahajan
Iraq Debate:
Ultra Hawk vs. Hawk
August 30, 2002
Kurt Nimmo
Clueless
at the State Dept.
Jay Diamond
Opie,
Anthony & Enron
Carol Norris
"Eat
All Your McAfrika Burger Honey!"
Alexander Cockburn
American
Journal:
Hitchens, Kissinger, Springsteen, Haggard & Elvis
August 29, 2002
Wayne Madsen
Bush's
Bizarro World
Michael Donnelly
A Real
Healthy Forests Initiative
Anis Shivani
Progressive
Irrelevance?
Matt Siegfried
What's
Behind Bush's War Moves Against Iraq?
William Hughes
Power
to the Laity
Chris Floyd
The Secret
Sharers:
The CIA and the Murder of Frank Olson
August 28, 2002
Will Youmans
The Fake
Debate on Iraq
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Islam
and Politics
Mikhail Gorbachev
Nature
Can't Wait
William Ring
War on Iraq:
The Brightest Scenario
August 27, 2002
Sam Bahour
The Violence
of Curfew
Wenonah Hauter
From Johannesburg:
Pacts with the Devil: Public-Private Partnerships and the Global
Environment
Jerre Skog
Wanted:
"Our Kind of Guy"
in Iraq!
Uri Avnery
Letter
to a Pilot
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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 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
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
September
9, 2002
The
October Surprise and the World It Made
Speak, Memory
by Chris Floyd
As the world prepares to mark the anniversary
of one of history's great turning points, we would be remiss
if we failed to make our contribution to the sad memorials.
And so, with heavy heart, we return to that fateful moment
when the forces of violent extremism struck a cowardly and deceitful
blow against the cause of freedom.
We refer, of course, to the weekend of
Oct. 18-19, 1980, when a former and future head of the CIA met
in Paris with representatives from a terrorist regime to plot
the cynical manipulation of an American presidential election.
It is an act of treason for private American
citizens to negotiate political deals with foreign governments
without official authorization. But that didn't stop George
Herbert Walker Bush and William Casey from sitting down with
the Ayatollah Khomeini's mullahs to discuss a matter of mutual
interest: making sure the 52 American hostages being held by
Iran stayed locked up until after the November election
contest between President Jimmy Carter and Republican challenger
Ronald Reagan.
The Republicans were terrified of an
"October Surprise"--a move by the Carter government
to free the hostages before the vote. So ex-CIA chief Bush--now
Reagan's vice-presidential candidate--and Casey were dispatched
to Paris to offer the Iranians a covert deal to keep the Americans
in chains until Reagan was safely in office. The proposed payoff?
A newly-elected Reagan-Bush administration would supply Khomeini's
military with a secret supply of American weapons.
The deal provoked furious debate in Teheran.
The secular revolutionaries who helped topple the U.S.-backed
tyranny of the Shah wanted to wash their hands of the hostages,
who had been seized by Khomeini's fanatical talibs. But the
religious extremists who held ultimate power liked the cut of
that Reagan-Bush jib.
And why not? The mullahs had much in
common with the American archconservatives. Both groups hated
Western modernity in almost all its forms (except technology--
especially military technology, which they embraced with fervor).
They despised modernity's personal freedoms, its social upheavals,
its sexual openness, its questioning of traditional authority,
and its many blasphemies against the primitive sky-god that
both groups blindly worshiped.
The ayatollah cast his lot with Reagan
and Bush. He held the American captives until the very minute
that Reagan-- victorious over the hapless Carter, who'd been
pilloried for "failing to free the hostages"--was
inaugurated as President. The CIA--hamstrung by Carter's reforms
and his intermittent commitment to human rights--was back in
business. They had their boy Bush in Reagan's White House;
their old pal Casey was the new CIA boss.
Iran got its payoff, too: sophisticated
U.S. weaponry flowed to the extremist regime, often using Israeli
intelligence as a middleman. The conduit proved valuable a few
years later, when the Reagan-Bush White House skimmed profits
from secret Iranian arms sales to pay for their drug-running
operations and terrorist camps in Latin America: the infamous
Iran-Contra scam.
But like the American people, the Iranian
mullahs were also suckered. While shipping arms to Teheran,
Reagan and Bush quietly embraced the mullah's mortal enemy,
Saddam Hussein. They gave him weapons, supported his invasion
of Iran, and supplied military intelligence to guide him while
he sprayed Iranian soldiers and innocent civilians with poison
gas. When Bush ascended to the Oval Office, he moved tons of
dual-use technology to Iraq, allowing Hussein to expand his
biochemical and nuclear weapons capabilities. If--and it's
a big if--Iraq poses any nuclear or biochemical threat today,
it's in part because George Bush and his cronies fiddled the
1980 election and foisted a "shadow government" dedicated
to covert war and death-dealing treachery on the American people,
and the world.
A few tendrils of these dark truths emerged
during the last days of half-hearted Congressional investigations
into Iran-Contra. The treasonous Republican intervention with
the mullahs was confirmed by several credible sources, foreign
and domestic, including two national leaders: Abolhassan Bani-Sadr,
who as president of Iran in 1980 had full knowledge of the negotiations;
and future Russian Prime Minister Sergei Stepashin. At the time
of the probe, Stepashin was head of the Supreme Soviet's Defense
and Security Issues Committee. At the request of the investigators,
he carried out an extensive review of Soviet intelligence files
and sent Congress a remarkably detailed report on the Reagan-Khomeini
connection.
Several witnesses (and Stepashin's report)
put Bush on the scene for at least one day of the Paris sessions.
Although Bush had unaccountably disappeared from the campaign
trail on the date in question, he told Congress that he'd "taken
a day off"--in the final push of a heated presidential
campaign--to visit two family friends. However, one friend --the
widow of a Supreme Court justice--said the purported visit never
happened. Bush adamantly refused to identify the second friend--unless
Congress promised "not to interview them at all."
Meekly, Congress agreed. There were no
subpoenas, no grand juries, no Starr warriors set loose to dissect
Bush's claims: just a quiet agreement among the elite to look
out for their own. Stepashin's report was disregarded; even
Bani-Sadr's direct knowledge was derided as a "secondary
account." The testimonies were buried in obscure archives
until investigative reporter Robert Parry hunted them down
and published them in his invaluable journal,
http://www.consortiumnews.com.
So yes, on Sept. 11, let's remember the
victims of violent extremism, and the heroes who died fighting
to save them. But let's also remember October 1980, and the
cynical operators who helped create a world where such insanity
can thrive.
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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