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Today's Stories August 1, 2007 Debbie Nathan More Secret Payments by Former NYT Reporter to Web Porn Star Surface in Nashville Courtroom July 31, 2007 Kathy Kelly Dancing in the Darkness: the Story of Abu Mahmoud Clancy Sigal The Ghosts of Passchendaele Paul Krassner Assholes of the Week: From Baby Doll to Cheney Joe DeRaymond Return to the Republic of Death? Diane Christian "Winning": What Bush Could Learn from the Shade of Achilles Chris Floyd Good News is No News: Why the Bush Adm. Buries Accounts of Extremist Recantations Ramzy Baroud Bush's Real Agenda in Palestine Alan Farago Battle for the Soul of Florida Fidel Castro In Spite of Everything: Reflections on the Pan American Games Dan Bacher The Fish Terminator: Schwarzenegger's Campaign to Build the Delta Canal and More Dams   July 30, 2007 Marjorie Cohn: Independent Counsel Time Patrick Cockburn Four Million Iraqis on the Run Peter Quinn Irish in America Uri Avnery A Warning to Tony Blair John Ross Zapatista Intergalatica Lands on Earth Ron Jacobs Free the San Francisco 8 David Vest Farewell, Old Friend: Another Legend of the Blues is Gone Jeffrey St. Clair T99 Nelson: Seduced by a Legend of the Blues Website of the Day Collateral Repair Project   July 28 / 29, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Now the NYT is Selling "Bloodbath" as a Rationale to Stay in Iraq Ralph Nader Rotten Justice Robert Fantina American Lies and Iraqi Nationalism Fred Gardner Prohibitionists Attack, Reformers Fundraise   Yves Engler Handwashing and the Bottomline   July 27, 2007 John Ross Bombing Pemex--or Not? Arthur Neslen Gaza was a Gas for Blair Dave Lindorff Declaring the US a Battlefield: Martial Law is Now a Real Threat Julene Blair The Environmentalist Within Christopher Brauchli Bush Uses Children as Shock Troops in His War on Socialized Medicine Jesse Hagopian Fund the Wounded, Not the War Charles Modiano Manufacturing a Villain: Sports Illustrated's Vilification of Barry Bonds Bill Day The Hollow Environmentalism of Leonardo DiCaprio Walter Brasch Leaders Afraid to Lead M.D. Mitchell Farm Based Camps Website of the Day Fighting Sarcoma   July 26, 2007 Kathleen Christison The Siren Song of Elliot Abrams Andy Worthington Why the Pentagon's Gitmo Study is a Joke Clancy Chassay How the Bush White House Seeks to Destroy Lebanon Marjorie Cohn Showdown Over Executive Privilege Susie Day Apartheid Americana David Price Tour de Witch Hunt: Drugs, Diaries and Purges Marie Trigona Argentina's "Dirty War" Crimes Trial: The Torturer Priest Norman Solomon Media Spin on Iraq: We're Leaving (Sort Of) William S. Lind How to Win in Iraq Natsu Saito Ward Churchill and the Regents at the University of Colorado John Stauber Netroots and the Iraq War: Does Ending It Matter to Them Anymore? Website of the Day Sticking It to the Man   July 25, 2007 Andy Worthington Gains and Losses at Gitmo Gary Leupp Bush Speechwriter, Michael Gerson, Calls for Attack on Syria Ray McGovern The Sad Decline of John Conyers Dr. Susan Block Bonobo Bashing in the New Yorker Joshua Frank Hillary's Neocon: the Imperial Vision of Richard Holbrooke Tina Richards What Harry Reid Doesn't Know About His Own Bill Ben Terrall Indonesia's Bloody Brand of CounterTerrorism Farzana Versey God Acquitted!: Lessons from the Case of Darwood Ibrahim Mohammad Ali Salih A Bomb in My Briefcase? Laura Carlsen A Strange Homecoming: Reflections on the First US Social Forum Ron Jacobs Come to Kennebunkport! Sunsara Taylor Knocked Up is F**ked Up Website of the Day Wal-Mart's Flip Flops: Feet Killers July 24, 2007 Saul Landau How to Walk in Bushtime Kathy Kelly The Plight of Iraqi Refugees in Jordan Russell Mokhiber The Michael Vick / George Bush Thing M. Shahid Alam Islam Now, China Then Patrick Cockburn and Anne Penketh Meeting in Baghdad Dave Lindorff Overcoming John Conyers Binoy Kampmark You Tube You Can't: Failure of a Medium Richard Neville Murdoch's Transplant: a Warning to the Wall Street Journal Cindy Sheehan We Must Move Beyond Politics as Usual Evelyn Pringle Anti-Depressants and Birth Defects: Why is the CDC Downplaying the Risks? Norman Solomon Media Corrections We'd Like to See CP Newswire Reading Harry Potter Not Sinful Website of the Day Sea Islands Black Heritage Festival   July 23, 2007 Andy Worthington Narcolepsy on Gitmo Detainees Uri Avnery A Trap for Fools Patrick Cockburn Turkish Prime Minister Threatens to Invade Northern Iraq Sousan Hammad The Children Without a Title John Walsh Todd Gitlin's Nader Fixation Harvey Wasserman Spinning Kashiwazaki: PR Flacks Rush to Aid of Crippled Nuke Martha Rosenberg The Life and Times of a Hog-Hanging Farmer Collin Baber Here Come the MRAPs: Resurrecting Apartheid Armor for Iraq Reza Fiyouzat Iran's Forgotten Anti-Nuke Movement Stephen Lendman Saving a President: Scare-Mongering and Executive Orders Website of the Day The Port Huron Project   July 21 / 22, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Giuliani and the Dogs of War Werther How to Read a National Intelligence Estimate Ralph Nader Atomic Blowback David Keen Buy Hard: How to Sell an Endless War Fred Gardner Karl Rove, Pothead: When Good Drugs Happen to Bad People Gary Leupp Edelman's Edict: Is Hillary "Reinforcing Enemy Propaganda?" Robert Fantina Fear in Iraq Saker The Future of Palestine: an Interview with Jonathan Cook Rannie Amiri Nasrallah in the Crosshairs: How will the Third Lebanon War Start? Mike Whitney The Crisis in Hedgistan Dr. Susan Rosenthal, MD The Hidden Injuries of Powerlessness: Linking Alienation and Dissociation Monica Benderman Facing the Truth Dan Bacher Deltagate: the Politics of Fish Kills Michael Baney Fujimori's Long Race From Justice Missy Beattie Here, There and Everywhere Ron Jacobs Tremble, Tyrants Adam Engel Radical Language: an Introduction Thomas Naylor California Split: an Open Letter to Schwarzenegger Poets' Basement Landau, Ford and Engel Website of the Weekend Surge in Action   July 20, 2007 Eliza Szabo Fatal Neglect: Civilian Casualties in Afghanistan Pam Martens Doctoring the News: CNN's Sanjay Gupta, Laura Bush and Merck Alan Farago Winners and Losers in the Housing Market Crash Harvey Wasserman Lies and Leaks: The Earthquake That Screamed "No Nukes!" Marjorie Cohn Iraqis will be the Deciders Dave Zirin White Noise and the Black Athlete Anthony DiMaggio American Public Opinion and Israel Scott Liebertz Oaxaca on Edge Linn Washington, Jr. British Cops Assault Rape Allegations Bill Piper / Anthony Papa Flying High?: The Political Junkets of Bush's Drug Czar Ramzy Baroud Bush's War Policy: When Time Heals Nothing Website of the Day The Prankster Art of Mark Jenkins   July 19, 2007 Patrick Cockburn The Next Invasion of Iraq Remi Kanazi Is This Ben Gurion or Hell?: a Palestinian Adventure Through Israel's Largest Airport Winslow T. Wheeler The Surging Costs of the Iraq War Sharon Smith Democrats and Health Care: Behind the Rhetoric Dave Lindorff Killing Cabbies in Iraq Conn Hallinan Have Gun, Will Travel: Mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan D. K. Wilson The Michael Vick Case Pulls Back the Veil on Who We Really Are Joshua Frank Democrats as Leviathan: Another Step Toward War with Iran Norman Solomon The Ghost of Wayne Morse Russell Hoffman Rattling the Reactor: Quakes, Fires and Leaks at the World's Largest Nuke Ray McGovern Bush's Wooden Headedness Kills Website of the Day Protesting Power July 18, 2007 Brenda Norrell Spy Towers on the US Border Col. Dan Smith How the US Could "Lose" Saudi Arabia Martha Rosenberg Lord of Crookharbour: the Trial of Conrad Black Conn Hallinan Bombing and Spraying Afghanistan Binoy Kampmark The SIM Card Terror Case Patrick Bond / Rehana Dada Who Killed Sajida Khan? Tom Johnson The Long Road ... to Nowhere Paul Craig Roberts A Free Press or a Ministry of Truth? Bob Quellos Pushing the Poor Out of House and Home Felice Pace Falling for Lieberman's Iran Resolution Robert Weissman National Health Insurance: More Humane and More Efficient CP Newswire Shocking Report Showing Involvement of US Psychologists in Torture Website of the Day Gilad Atzmon Live!   July 17, 2007 Patrick Cockburn Just Another Day in Iraq: 100 Fathers, Mothers and Children Killed Marjorie Cohn Out of Control: Executive Power Plays Evelyn Pringle Inside Bush's FDA David Rosen Moral Hypocrisy on the Hill: the Christian Right, Sexual Scandal and the Pleasures of the Courtesan Susan Miller Width Matters: Displacement and Israel's Wall Franklin Lamb Did the UN Cave to Israel on Lebanon's Shabaa Farms? Don Monkerud Considering Victory in Iraq Harvey Wasserman Nuclear Surge Russell Hoffman Japan Dodges a Radioactive Bullet Dave Lindorff Feingold Turns to Dross Dave Zirin Reclaiming Sports as True Fiction Website of the Day Che at the UN: 1964   July 16, 2007 Gary Leupp Cheney Urges Bush to Strike Iran Ellen Cantarow The Untold Story of Iraqi Women Paul Craig Roberts Impeach Now Allan J. Lichtman The D.C. Madam's Public Service Dan Bacher Cheney and the Klamath: Was the Veep Behind the Nation's Worst Salmon Kill? Patrick Cockburn The Killing of Khalid W. Hassan Manuel Garcia, Jr. Property is Racism James Brooks AIPAC and Mahmoud Abbas: the Undemocratic Road to Defeat Liaquat Ali Khan The Judicial Crisis in Pakistan Julie Flint Suleiman Jamous in Limbo Website of the Day Free Suleiman Jamous!   July 14 / 15. 2007 Alexander Cockburn Support Their Troops? Andy Worthington Gitmo's Tangled Web: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Majhid Khan, Dubious US Convictions and a Dying Man Ralph Nader Lawlessness, Waste and Incompetence Robert Fantina The Illegalities of the Iraq War Ron Jacobs Architecture as Military Strategy Joshua Frank Eat, Fight, Screw, Pray: An Interview with Joe Bageant Conn Hallinan Guns, Foundations and Free Trade: How the Right Targets Africa Dr. Susan Rosenthal, MD War and Dissociation John Ross No En Nuestro Nombre!: a Letter to the Mexican Antiwar Movement Fred Gardner Who's Afraid of Cannabidiol? Rannie Amiri A Primer on Israeli Doublespeak Charles Modiano ESPN's Rap Sheet: Pacman as Black Man Anthony DiMaggio America's Parochial Press China Hand Executive Orders and Coercive Diplomacy Missy Comley Beattie Reprobate Rhetoricians Dr. James J. Murtagh, Jr. Harry Potter Battles Big Brother Kenneth Rexroth On Thomas More's "Utopia" Poets' Basement Engel, Davies and Orloski Website of the Weekend GOP Sex Hypocrites: a Slideshow

August 1, 2007 McKinney Sues Atlanta Journal-Constitution The Corporate Plan to Crush Black Resistance By GLEN FORD In a suit filed in Georgia state court, former congresswoman Cynthia McKinney charges the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC) and its parent company, Cox Enterprises, a multi-national corporation, with waging a libelous, defamatory and malicious vendetta resulting in the loss of her congressional seat, last year. The case is a window - albeit a narrow, legal one - on the general corporate campaign to penetrate and reshape black politics in the United States, to impose a docile class of corporate-friendly black "leaders." The corporate press is key to accomplishing the coup. At the core of the suit is Cynthia Tucker, the black editor of the AJC's editorial page, who has for years been incapable of uttering McKinney's name without sneering. Tucker, depicted McKinney's March, 2006, encounter with a Capitol Hill policeman as an unprovoked assault, pure and simple. "She slugged him with her telephone," wrote Tucker, in a column that appeared barely a week before McKinney faced challenger Hank Johnson, the favorite of most whites and the corporate establishment, in a Democratic primary runoff. Tucker "tried to spin this incident into a felony," said McKinney, in her suit. "This false and libelous allegation is not supported by any witness or other evidence." McKinney was never indicted for any crime, and says the incident was the result of racial and political harassment by the Capitol Police. Tucker made McKinney's defeat a priority project. "Tucker falsely attempted to attribute what she interprets as anti-Semitic statements by Cynthia McKinney's father by stating that ‘her father, [is] a spokesman for the campaign,'" the suit states. "Her father was not a spokesman for the campaign or for her." McKinney has long been targeted by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee for her failure to tow the Israeli line in Congress. Although McKinney's father, a former Atlanta police officer and state lawmaker, has indeed made indiscreet comments, no one has ever claimed Rep. McKinney has uttered anything that could remotely be deemed anti-Semitic. "The attempted attribution was false, defamatory and libelous," states her legal brief. McKinney labels as "malicious" Tucker's repetitive assertions that "She suggested that President Bush had known in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks but did nothing to stop them so his friends could profit from the ensuing war." That's not what McKinney said, back in the Spring of 2002, and her questioning of the conduct and motives of the Bush regime have since proved prescient. Cox Enterprises' Atlanta radio outlet, WSB, carried attacks on McKinney. She looks like a "ghetto slut," shrieked talk show personality Neal Boortz - a "slander," according to McKinney's suit. Cox did nothing to rein in their radio personality, and Cynthia Tucker won a Pulitzer Prize for her columns, including the one that savaged McKinney. A Cox spokesman called McKinney's suit "preposterous." Newspaper as Serial Liar The Atlanta Journal-Constitution worked in tandem with corporate money and AIPAC to first unseat Cynthia McKinney in the 2002 Democratic primary election. The paper, like its corporate siblings across the nation, was anxious to prove that a political sea change had occurred in Black America. Gone were the days of "civil rights-style" rhetoric and confrontation - or so the theory went. Middle class African Americans like those in McKinney's district, centered in Dekalb County, the second most affluent Black majority county in the nation, were becoming more conservative, it was said. According to the new paradigm the Cynthia McKinneys of Black America are passé, and no longer appeal to an upwardly mobile class of African American voters. Dekalb County would tell the tale. While AIPAC and corporate donors stuffed the coffers of black challenger Denise Majette - a former Republican and protégé of pro-Republican Democratic Senator Zell Miller - the Atlanta Journal Constitution provided Majette with free publicity and attack-dog services. Cynthia Tucker led the local and national corporate media pack, intent on making a fait accompli of their own analysis, that blacks were sliding to the Right. Tens of thousands of white Republicans prepared to cross over to vote as Democrats in the "open primary," eager to put the uppity McKinney in her place. Majette outspent the McKinney by 40 per cent. Majette won. Corporate media rejoiced, nationwide. As their local representative, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution claimed to conduct a study that showed Majette had assembled a "biracial coalition of voters" to win victory, ushering in a new age of "centrist" black politics. The prophecy had been fulfilled. Bruce Dixon, now Black Agenda Report's managing editor, did his own study of the election data and found that Majette could not have won more than 19 percent of the Black vote. The key to Majette's victory was an abnormally high white turnout, 90 percent of which she won. Majette was not the Great Black Centrist Hope - she was the white candidate, and the black community had overwhelmingly supported McKinney. There was no history-shaking "split" among blacks in relatively affluent Dekalb County; it was a fiction. More than half a year after Dixon proved that the Atlanta Journal Constitution's "study" was bogus, the paper's own favorite political scientist and quote-man, University of Georgia Prof. Charles Bullock, declared Majette's "bi-racial coalition" a myth. His research showed Majette garnered no more than 17 percent of the black vote. "What Majette needs to be doing is getting out, courting in the black community, trying to broaden her coalition because she did so poorly in her community," wrote Prof. Bullock. What Majette did was get out of the district, embarking on a Quixotic, hopeless quest for Zell Miller's vacating senate seat. With no time for AIPAC, the Atlanta Journal Constitution and corporate capital to vet a Designated Negro of their own, Cynthia McKinney won her seat back in 2004. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found defamatory manna from heaven in the last year of McKinney's term, when a Capitol Hill policeman confronted her as she attempted to do the people's work. We commend Cynthia McKinney for challenging Tucker and the Cox corporate giant that is Tucker's only backbone, in court, while fully understanding that the chances of judicial success are slim. If deliberate distortion of reality by corporate media could be effectively prosecuted in the United States, the entire industry would be behind bars or bankrupted. McKinney is putting their crimes against truth on the record, and we salute her. The assaults against McKinney's character and seven-term career are but one skirmish in a nationwide corporate offensive that was sketched out by rightwing strategists in the mid-Nineties and fully implemented in the early years of the Bush regime. For the first time, corporate American would make a concerted and coordinated effort to cleanse the African American polity of what remained of the Black Freedom Movement. The year 2002 was their D-Day for invasion of black politics. They came strapped with millions in cash, and the supporting artillery of corporate media. The first target was Newark, New Jersey, where the hard right Bradley Foundation’s black acolyte Cory Booker, a 31-year-old second term city councilman and private school voucher advocate, raised millions in his mayoral campaign and won endorsements from every New York region corporate media outlet, thanks to the skills of the Bradley-funded Manhattan Institute. I am proud to say that my research and writings, exposing him as a Trojan Horse for the Right, forestalled Booker's ascension to City Hall for four years. Booker was beaten, but remained on the A-list of corporate-designated "new black leaders" until he finally won the mayor's office in 2006. The corporate juggernaut rolled on, in 2002, vastly overspending (by 60 percent) and ousting Black Alabama Congressman Earl Hilliard, who had resisted the pro-Israel lobby and corporate demands. He was replaced by the pliant but deviously skilled Artur Davis. Then it was Cynthia McKinney's turn, later that summer. At the end of the 2002 offensive, the corporate blitzkrieg had installed Artur Davis, Denise Majette, and an obscure new congressman from the Atlanta-area, David Scott, in the Congressional Black Caucus. They joined Columbus, Georgia's Sanford Bishop and the rapidly Right-rushing Harold Ford, Jr. (TN) to form a corporate faction within the Caucus, along with Maryland's Albert Wynn and shaky members who trembled whenever the winds blew rightward. The Congressional Black Caucus was finished as a coherent political force on Capitol Hill, unable to resist corporate capital as represented in its own ranks. The black masses have not undergone any political sea change; they have simply been abandoned by their representatives, who have been suborned or terrorized by money and concentrated media and lobby power. Corporations have embraced "diversity" as a weapon. About a decade ago, they realized that their vast wealth empowered them to create an alternative black political structure, and that there were plenty of black opportunists eager to be recruited. At this point, corporate victory is all but complete, having neutered black electoral and traditional institutions in lightning speed. The disaster puts in graphic relief the failures of legal strategies, which are so narrow that nine people on the Supreme Court can thwart the will of 40 million African Americans, and the impotence of conventional electoral strategies, which are negated in Dekalb County, Georgia, and everywhere else in the nation through sheer force of money. There is no substitute for a mass movement in opposition to the cages that capital erects around us. Cynthia McKinney represents the overwhelming majority of black people in her district. They are inspired by her courage and defiance of Power - and are no different than African Americans, everywhere. The corporate project uses its media to invent a fantasy black polity, and then deploys its media muscle and money to make it so. Some of us believe the constantly repeated lie. If it goes unchallenged long enough, it becomes a received truth - and progressive politics, with its base in black America, will be over. African Americans must press for self-determination, not mitigated by money or the power of white voter "democracy" - a democracy from Hell, as we have known throughout our entire sojourn on this continent. Only WE affirm ourselves, not corporate media, not the millions that Barack Obama gathers from his rich friends. But that means we must organize. It is a lifelong project, as it was for our ancestors. Glen Ford is editor of Black Agenda Report, where this piece appears. He can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

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