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Today's Stories

December 20 / 21, 2003

Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis

December 19, 2003

Elaine Cassel
Courts Rebuke Bush for Trampling the Constitution

Robert Fisk
Raid on Fantasyville: Shooting Samarra's Schoolboys in the Back

Zoltan Grossman
The Occupation Has Failed to "Capture" the Loyalty of Iraqis

Mike Whitney
Bush's Afghan Highway to Nowhere

Harold Gould
Has the Radical Arab Strategy Really Worked?

Gary Leupp
The Neocon's Dream Memo

 

December 18, 2003

Ann Harrison
A Landmark Victory for Medical Pot

John L. Hess
Catfish Blues: The SOB's from Out of Town

Karyn Strickler
Ebola is Good for You!

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Duryodhana Dies

Harry Browne
Hail Jim Hickey, the "Irish Hero" of the Colonial Occupation of Iraq

Hammond Guthrie
Captured in Abasement

December 17, 2003

Robert Fisk
Saddam's Cold Comforts

Gideon Levy
"Don't Even Think About the Children"

Marjorie Cohn
The Fortuitous Arrest of Saddam: a Pyrrhic Victory?

Andrew Cockburn
Saddam's Last Act


December 16, 2003

Robert Fisk
Getting Saddam...15 Years Too Late

Mahajan / Jensen
Saddam in Irons: The Hard Truths Remain

John Halle
Matt Gonzalez and Me

Josh Frank
The Democrats and Saddam

Tariq Ali
Saddam on Parade: the New Model of Imperialism


December 15, 2003

Robert Fisk
The Capture of Saddam Won't Stop the Guerrilla War

Dave Lindorff
The Saddam Dilemma

Abu Spinoza
Blowback on the Stand: The Trial of Saddam Hussein

Norman Solomon
For Telling the Truth: the Strange Case of Katharine Gun

Patrick Cockburn
The Capture of Saddam

Stew Albert
Joy to the World

 

December 13 / 14, 2003

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli Connection

Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural

Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory

Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet

Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry

Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to Gov. Mitt Romney

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD

Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand

William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War

Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency

Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy

Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East

Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman

Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised

Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed

Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review

Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee

Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians

Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race

 

December 12, 2003

Josh Frank
Halliburton, Timber and Dean

Chris Floyd
The Inhuman Stain

Dave Lindorff
Infanticide as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies

Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?

Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva Accords

David Vest
Bush Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton


December 11, 2003

Siegfried Sassoon
A Soldier's Declaration Against War

Douglas Valentine
Preemptive Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program

John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra

Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride

James M. Carter
The Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq


December 10, 2003

Kurt Nimmo
The War According to Newt Gingrich

Pat Youngblood / Robert Jensen
Workers Rights are Human Rights

Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children

CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart Case

Dave Lindorff
Gore's Judas Kiss


December 9, 2003

Michael Donnelly
A Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder

Chris White
A Glitch in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?

Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style

Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus

Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now

Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens

Ron Jacobs
Remembering John Lennon

 

December 8, 2003

Newton Garver
Bolivia at a Crossroads

John Borowski
The Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville

William Blum
Anti-Empire Report: Revised Inspirations for War

Tess Harper
When Christians Kill

Thom Rutledge
My Next Step

Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear Terror and Psychic Numbing

Michael Neumann
Ignatieff: Apostle of He-manitariansim

Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak

 

December 6 / 7, 2003

Alexander Cockburn
The UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great

CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of Anti-Semitism"

Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist

Saul Landau
"Reality Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq

Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win

Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer

Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?

Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire

Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami

Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia

Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia and Dominican Republic

Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank

Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race

Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN

Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise

Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation

Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley

Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday

Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the Caribbean"

Jeffrey St. Clair
A Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston

Mickey Z.
Press Box Red

Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert

T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?

 

 

December 5, 2003

Jeremy Scahill
Bremer of the Tigris

Jeremy Brecher
Amistad Revisited at Guantanamo?

Norman Solomon
Dean and the Corp Media Machine

Norman Madarasz
France Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination

Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan: the Road Back


December 4, 2003

M. Junaid Alam
Image and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein

Adam Engel
Republican

Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI

Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia

Gary Leupp
The Fall of Shevardnadze

Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr

December 3, 2003

Stan Goff
Feeling More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money

Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates

George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?

Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart

John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario

Harry Browne
Shannon Warport: "No More Business as Usual"

 

December 2, 2003

Matt Vidal
Denial and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom

Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas

Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?

Norman Solomon
That Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test

Josh Frank
Trade War Fears

Andrew Cockburn
Tired, Terrified, Trigger-Happy


December 1, 2003

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam

Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland

Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media

Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?

Gilad Atzmon
About "World Peace"

Bill Christison
US Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes


November 29 / 30, 2003

Peter Linebaugh
On the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone

Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos

Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math

Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative

Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview with John Pilger

Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam

Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream

Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia

Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser

Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali

Standard Schaefer
Unions are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes

Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay Bridge

Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again

Adam Engel
The System Really Works

Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool

Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans

Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace

Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy

Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith

 

 

November 28, 2003

William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes

David Vest
Turkey Potemkin

Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks

Wayne Madsen
Wag the Turkey

Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited

Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?

South Asia Tribune
The Story of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words

Website of the Day
Bush Draft


November 27, 2003

Mitchel Cohen
Why I Hate Thanksgiving

Jack Wilson
An Account of One Soldier's War

Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas

Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD

Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer

Neve Gordon
Gays Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa

 


November 26, 2003

Paul de Rooij
Amnesty International: the Case of a Rape Foretold

Bruce Jackson
Media and War: Bringing It All Back Home

Stew Albert
Perle's Confession: That's Entertainment

Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities

David Orr
Miami Heat

Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists on the Beach

Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami

Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates

Kathy Kelly
Hogtied and Abused at Ft. Benning

Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement

 


November 25, 2003

Linda S. Heard
We, the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy

Diane Christian
Hocus Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators

Mark Engler
Miami's Trade Troubles

David Lindorff
Ashcroft's Cointelpro

Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas


November 24, 2003

Jeremy Scahill
The Miami Model

Elaine Cassel
Gulag Americana: You Can't Come Home Again

Ron Jacobs
Iraq Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?

Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant

 

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Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians

Steve J.B.
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Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber
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Wendell Berry
Small Destructions Add Up

CounterPunch Wire
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Cindy Corrie
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Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution

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Weekend Edition
December 20 / 21, 2003

Life Under Occupation

A Sealed Laboratory of Repression

By JULIANA FREDMAN

It seems like the end of the world. It all stops here, up against the wall.

When Jenin camp was destroyed there was, for what it was worth, and international outcry. True, Israel blocked the official U.N inquiry, the mined layers of rubble remained for 5 months after the attack, and on the recently cleared moonscape of Jenin's `Ground Zero' few houses have risen from the dust. Nonetheless, whether for the strength of the resistance or from the scale of destruction, Jenin has pervaded the consciousness of those outside the region. And there is a general belief among the people of this community that despite everything they will continue to survive here.

During the Ramadan season the camp felt festive. Families wandered around in the night greeting neighbors and visiting for sweets. In an odd twist `silent night', played in a style evoking an ice cream truck, blared from a clothing store. But most of all some houses are coming back. The gaping holes of the ravaged buildings- once sealed with only blankets, have finally been repaired. Jenin is beginning to look a little less like Kabul.

My first image upon arriving to Jenin camp in June of 2002 was of smoldering heaps covered by tanks, returned to the scene of the crime to drive over the rubble and broken homes until even the debris had been demolished. The stunned looks on the face of the old man who did not seem to notice as he sat on his living room couch that the wall of his home was gone leaving him exposed as a tableau to neighbors, soldiers and foreign delegations alike.

"Before the camp was beautiful" A friend tells me. "Now it is not." But her memories of the camp `before' are tied up with an irretrievable past. Before her mother and younger brother bled to death in their home. Before her own house was hit by two apache rockets.

To me, who knew this woman's deceased relatives only from shaheed posters and who is glad to finally see her father and brothers without constant tears in their eyes, the camp looks alive. The most recent bout of 6 week of daily curfew, which halted all school and work, tell us if we need proof, that the trials of invasion and occupation persist irrespective of the news cycle. Yet everyone knows of Jenin, however they choose to remember it.

Nobody remembers Rafah where the bulldozers come every night. When 150-200 houses are destroyed it rates a mention on the evening news. The 1or 2 or 8 on a more typical night go unrecorded.

Rafah, one of the most densely populated places on earth has nowhere to absorb the 2000 newly homeless. It is full, with 90,000 registered refugees. Now people live in tents among the rubble, next to guard towers that spray machine gun fire all day and all night . The view through the ruins is of the new iron wall on the border with Egypt 10 meters closer than the old border wall, stealing yet more precious space for an enlarged military zone and endless patrols of tanks and bulldozers. They stay because there is nowhere to go. When asked if he will rebuild one man just shrugs. He can not even approach the spot where his home stood it is a free fire zone.

And beyond the endless piles of concrete and rebar, shoes and dishes, sparkles the Mediterranean Sea, like a mirage. Inaccessible to the people of Rafah for years and controlled by the army and the settlers of Rafiah Yam, the ocean can be heard from the edge of the camp and its smell is discernible even with the stink of sewage unleashed by inadequate and tank ravaged pipes.

Consistent with the infinite ironies of media attention, one of the best known images internationally from this part of Palestine is blonde, American Rachel Corrie, killed beneath the blade of an Israeli bulldozer last spring. The paramedic who took her broken body from this wasteland to the hospital where she died, now lies himself in a hospital bed in Khan Yunis, two gunshot wounds ripping holes from his chest through his back.

He was shot out of a sniper tower during the last invasion, really just an acceleration of the constant invasion that is Rafah. The last thing that Raja Omar remembers from Oct.10, 2003 is some children calling for him to retrieve an injured person from inside the UNRWA installation in the wrecked Yibna section of Rafah camp.

From here his older brother, a nurse at the hospital with perfect English, takes over and describes watching his little brother on life support for 4 days. His voice breaks as he gestures at his brother's uniform hanging next to the bed. "Everyone, everywhere knows that this is the uniform of a medical worker". Raja winces silently clutching a picture of him standing with his ambulance and another with his 3-year-old son to his chest like talismen.

18 people were killed during the last invasion. Rafah has one hospital, founded as a 50-bed clinic. This ought not be a problem as 20 minutes away in Khan Yunis is a large, clean and relatively modern hospital offering many services. However, as is often the case during moments of acute crisis the road between Rafah and Khan Yunis was blocked by the army while they were invading the southern camps. The director of the small hospital said that the soldiers would open fire on ambulances that tried to pass "even on the sand roads."

So this clinic with no OBGYN department performed 10 cesareans in those two weeks and 70 high-risk deliveries. The 130 injuries all came here, including 35 critical cases. 13 serious operations were carried out in makeshift OR's by one general surgeon. Things were particularly bad, Dr. Pardawed told us looking bleary eyed and inhaling deeply from his cigarette because the Israelis used "heavy bullets, not normal bullets. Explosive bullets and rockets from airplanes."

A gruff pride creeps into his voice as he describes the surgeries they carried out here. Sabra Shami, 45 hit by a bullet in the head, the army refused to allow him through to Khan Yunis so they performed impromptu neuro-surgery -20 hours after they finished they finally got permission to transfer him. An 18 year old boy `caught a bullet direct in their heart' and so the general surgeon, trained no doubt for appendixes and tonsils, carried out his third open heart surgery of this intifada.

`Both patients,' Dr. Pardawed says, not quite smiling, `are until now still alive'.

The 'still alive' fill the wards of EL Wafa rehabilitation hospital in Shifa. Rooms full of mostly young men and boys paralyzed from the neck or the waste or twitching in comas from which they will never wake up, their limbs curling into a fetal position. A boy of 15 smiles sweetly as he obligingly lifts the one limb that still moves slightly. His left leg. The doctors tell me his spinal cord was irreparably damaged by shrapnel from one of the missles that regularly fall from the skies here. He is the `collateral damage' of the policy of arial extra judicial assassinations. They are ready to send him home, they say, but first they must train the family for a week to take care of him to prevent bedsores and such, there is nothing else to be done. The number of gravely disabled in Palestine has risen from 2.3 to 2.9 in the past three years, most of them are spinal cord and brain injuries.

This is Rafah. 259 dead in this intifada, 45 of them children, not to speak of the thousands of injuries that often make the entire city/camp appear as a giant rehab ward. 75% of the people here live in poverty and there is no moment at which it seems as though it will ever get any better because there is no moment at which it appears that anyone outside this cramped space knows what life is to the people unfortunate enough to live in this sealed laboratory of repression at the end of the world.

Juliana Fredman is a film maker working on a documentary about Health care under occupation in the West Bank. She can be contacted at joolz@riseup.net

Weekend Edition Features for Dec. 13 / 14, 2003

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli Connection

Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural

Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory

Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet

Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry

Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to Gov. Mitt Romney

Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD

Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand

William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War

Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency

Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy

Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East

Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman

Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised

Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed

Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review

Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee

Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians

Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race

 


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