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Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories May 21 / 22, 2005 David H. Price CIA Skullgery in Academia May 20, 2005 Dave Lindorff Newsweek and White House Hypocrisy Kevin Zeese As Insurgency Increases, New US Military Recruits Fall Paul de Rooij "Private": a Film in Search of a Cliché Christopher Brauchli How Insurance Companies Exploited 9/11 Mark Engler Triumph Over Debt? Joshua Frank Bush to Dine with Porn Star Robert Jensen TV Talk, No Evidence Required Jeffery R. Webber Bolivia Erupts May 19, 2005 Bill Forman An Interview with Alexander Cockburn Stan Goff Hey, Democrats, Listen to Galloway and Learn Something Neve Gordon From Ghettos to Frontiers: What Will Happen After Israel Withdraws from Gaza Michael Dickinson The Trouble with Menwith: Tagging British Peace Activists Karyn Strickler The Texas Nexus: How Racial and Political Gerrymandering United Andrew Freedman Nazi Science at NIH Paul Craig Roberts The Politics and Economics of Outsourcing   May 18, 2005 Jean Bricmont Vive La France? Laura Carlsen Bush's Posada Carriles Quandry: an Anti-Cuba Terrorist is Still a Terrorist Mike Whitney The Secret Raids of Alberto Gonzales: 10,000 Swept Up Joshua Frank Flushing the Koran: Why Newsweek Got It Right George Galloway Thusly, I Humiliated Norm Coleman (and Christopher Hitchens) Manuel Garcia, Jr. Writing Tickets for American War Crimes Dwight D. Eisenhower How the GOP will Destroy Itself Dave Lindorff The Plot to Make the PATRIOT Act Even Worse May 17, 2005 Mickey Z. GIs Behaving Badly Petuuche Gilbert The People of Acoma Still Fight to be Free Paul Craig Roberts Lies That Kill: Why Isn't Bush in the Dock? Ramzy Baroud The New Palestinian Uprising Robert Jensen / Pat Youngblood Pinning the Blame on Newsweek Stan Cox Poisoning Patancheru: the Severe Side Effects of India's Drug Industry Dave Zirin American Anthem: Ozzie Guillen and Fining for Freedom Diana Barahona Reporters Without Borders Unmasked Website of the Day Revolutionary Flower Pot Society May 16, 2005 Michael Gillespie The Family Released a Statement: Death Notices for the Warrior Theocracy Jason Leopold BP Stains the Arctic Jesse Muldoon How Many Schools Left Behind? Norman Solomon Media and the War: "The Bombs in Iraq Explode at Home" Robert Cray Twenty Patrick Cockburn Iraq is a Bloody No Man's Land Website of the Day Bolton's Divorce Papers: She Took It All Away, Including Most of the Furniture May 14 / 15, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Join the 14 Per Cent Club! Saul Landau Lessons from Vietnam: Wars Kill Empires as Well as People Gary Leupp Whither Yale? Towards the Imperial University JoAnn Wypijewski The Glory that is Lockhart, Texas Ben Tripp The Wayward Airplane: a Cautionary Tale Brian J. Foley Was Jesus Gay? Tom Barry Bolton the Eavesdropper Mitchell Verter Barbarous Oaxaca: Indigenous Rights Groups Meet the "Law of the Club" Mike Ferner War on COs: Army Files Additional Charges Against Kevin Benderman Dan Smith Perceiving Darfur Mark Scaramella Death with Pitfalls Don Fitz Mommy, Is This a Finger in My Rice Puffs?: Splicing Human DNA into the Food Chain Diane Farsetta PR Industry Imitates Big Tobacco: the Senate's "Fake News" Hearings Michael Dickinson Soldier Crawling: Military Conscription in Turkey Ron Jacobs The Jackson State Murders Fred Gardner "Hydroponics? Ridiculous!": A Real Farmer Looks at Medical Marijuana Farrah Hassen Far From Heaven: a Review of Ridley Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven" Douglas Valentine 50 Cent's Plea Poets' Basement Louise, Ford, Engel, & Albert Website of the Weekend Military Base Closings and the South May 13, 2005 Tom Stephens A Chronology of US War Crimes and Torture, 1975-2005 Patrick Cockburn "They Destroyed Everything" Mike Whitney Tom Friedman, Imperial Chronicler Chris Floyd Miami Vice: the Sleazy World of Jeb Bush Jenna Orkin Ground Zero's Toxic Dust Dave Lindorff Googling for Fun Joshua Frank Yale Fires an Acclaimed Anarchist Scholar: an Interview with David Graeber Website of the Day Botero: Pinta El Horror de Abu Ghraib   May 12, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts America is Losing: More Phony Jobs Hype Uri Avnery Death of a Myth Greg Moses Neo-Con Logic at the Border Carolyn Baker The Politics of Dominionism: the New Religious Right in America Pat Williams Amateurish High Jinks on Roadless Areas William S. Lind Reality Gap: the Myth of US Invincibilty Jack Random The Dubious Wisdom of George W. Bush Gary Leupp Douglas Feith Bares His Soul to Jeffrey Goldberg     May 11, 2005 Patrick Cockburn The Rise, Fall and Rise of Ahmed Chalabi: King of Jordan to Pardon His $300 Million Bank Swindle Kevin Zeese The Occupation Gets More Saddam-like Every Day Christopher Brauchli Coffee, Tea or Torture?: A One Way Ticket to Uzbekistan Zalman Amit The Collapse of Academic Freedom in Israel: Tantura, Teddy Katz and Haifa University Robert Shull Carte Blanche for the Terror Cops: Senate Gives DHS Power to Waive All Laws Mike Whitney God, Gays, and George Bernard Shaw Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Anti-Arabic Week at a Southern High School Norman Solomon Political Bluster and the Filibuster   May 10, 2005 Richard Drayton The Imperial Mythology of WW II: an Ethical Blank Check Dave Zirin Steve Nash's Brilliant Year: Anti-War Hoopster Wins NBA's MVP Jackie Corr The Medicare Catch: Mrs. O'Hara's Windfall Dave Lindorff Silence of the Scams: Economists on China Michael Donnelly From Roadless to Clueless: the Great Stillborn Eco Victory Reza Fiyouzat Nomadic Abstracts Scott Parkin Taking Direct Action Against Halliburton Stephen Babcock The Burden of Knowing Better Alan Farago Florida, Water and Lobbyists Michael Neumann Naomi's Courage Website of the Day One Nation Under Plagiarism   May 9, 2005 Louis Proyect Shilling for Chevron: Jared Diamond, Greenwasher Robert Fisk "Mission Accomplished": the Occupation, Year Two Kevin Zeese Concientious Objection on Trial: the Court Martial of Keith Benderman Joshua Frank Kerry Bashes Gay Marriage Sasha Kramer A Mother's Day Call for Justice in Haiti's Prisons Andrew Wimmer Create and Resist Jeffrey Webber Back to the Streets in Bolivia? Jeffrey St. Clair Straight to Bechtel   May 7 / 8, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Who Beat Hitler? Gary Leupp Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism Saul Landau Pope Torquemada: Purges, Pedophiles and Cover-Ups Joe DeRaymond Autumn of the Revolutionary: Another Look at Daniel Ortega Daniela Ponce Seeing Chile in Nepal Heather Williams Hollywood Does Enron Gregory Elich Zimbabwe's Fight for Justice Anis Memon To Cuba and Back John Chuckman The Peculiar State: "Criticism of Israel is a Form of Anti-Semitism" Mike Whitney Hard Right Rage Against the Truth Ron Jacobs Re-Reading "Born on the Fourth of July" as the Iraq War Grinds On Colin Kalmbacher Whither Disorder? Ann Coulter and the Texas Police State, Cont. Lance Selfa Uprising in Mexico City Fred Gardner "Getting High is a Little Like Cuba" Ben Tripp Letters on Wittgenstein Mickey Z. The Mother of All Days Richard Joseph Those Patriotic Magnets Dr. Susan Block Come As You Are: Masturbation 101 Poets' Basement Smith-Ferri, Louise, Nettnin, Engel and Albert     May 6, 2005 Patrick Cockburn Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and Blood Erin Yoshioka Another "3 Strikes" Travesty: Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison? Sam Husseini Talking with Syrians Dave Lindorff Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters Kevin Zeese Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead Guilty Joshua Frank An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War Dan Bacher Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water Raid P. Sainath India's Bloody Water Wars     May 5, 2005 Carles Mutaner Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist" or "Populist?" Carl G. Estabrook Is There Any Hope for the Pope? Farrah Hassen The US's Syrian Obsession Kevin Zeese "Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview with Patrick Resta Michael Leonardi May Day with an American Soldier in Rome Bennett Ramberg The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You Ray McGovern The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit Norman Solomon Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran Nicole Colson The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights Brian Concannon, Jr. Clearing the Fences in Haiti     May 4, 2005 Colin Kalmbacher Ann Coulter and the Police State: Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested John Walsh Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying on Air America to Support the War Greg Moses Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises "Birth of a Nation" Ali Khan Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart Chris Floyd Ring Them Bells Linda S. Heard D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics Dave Zirin The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle William S. Lind Fool's Paradise Gary Leupp Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution Website of the Day Kent State, May 4, 1970   May 3, 2005 Dave Lindorff Bush has Grasped the Third Rail, Now Turn on the Juice Brian Cloughley Halliburton's War Loot Ira Kurzban Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers Seth Sandronsky Towards Debtors' Prisons? Gilad Atzmon The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More Michael Donnelly Branding Eco Collapse Alex Sanchez Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush? Peter Linebaugh Magna Carta and May Day   May 2, 2005 Ron Jacobs Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement Stan Goff The Case of Hasan Akbar Karyn Strickler Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics Joshua Frank Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly Kevin Zeese Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam Vicente Navarro Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician       April 30 / May 1, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and "Credibility" Gabriel Kolko Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later Jennifer Loewenstein The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood Lee Sustar City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago Saul Landau The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power T.W. Croft The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy Nikolas Kozloff Fox News v. Hugo Chavez William Blum Never-Ending Double Standards Dave Lindorff Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly Joshua Frank The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls Doug Giebel Saving Jane Fonda Steven Erlanger A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief Fred Gardner Washington State Doctor Harassed Mike Whitney Another Mad Bush Press Conference Kurt Nimmo Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine Joe DeRaymond A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania Michael Dickinson Flags Mickey Z. May Day at Yankee Stadium Justin Taylor The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy Poets Basement Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair Website of the Weekend Save Barbados's Cowpastor                                             Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con! Subcomandante Marcos The Death Train of the WTO Norman Finkelstein Hitchens as Model Apostate Steve Niva Israel's Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings? Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams CounterPunch Exclusive: 20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians Steve J.B. Prison Bitch Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber True Lies: the Use of Propaganda in the Iraq War Wendell Berry Small Destructions Add Up CounterPunch Wire WMD: Who Said What When Cindy Corrie A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter I Can't Hear From Gore Vidal The Erosion of the American Dream Francis Boyle Impeach Bush: A Draft Resolution Click Here for More Stories.     Subscribe Online

Weekend Edition May 21 / 22, 2005 Pot Shots Dr. Wolman Martyred; O'Connell Goes on the Record By FRED GARDNER Mendocino psychiatrist, and sometime CounterPunch contributor, Carol Wolman, MD, one of four openly pro-cannabis doctors placed on probation by the Medical Board of California, is the first to be barred from granting approval to cannabis-using patients. Wolman, 64, a graduate of Radcliffe and Harvard Medical School, has been writing a commentary on the Bible emphasizing the pacifism and fairness of Jesus. The MBC began investigating her in 2001 following a complaint by a DEA agent that turned out to be groundless. When the Board found another reason to place her on probation, Wolman concluded that she'd been "targeted... whether for marijuana, peace activism, or simply because I serve a MediCal population, and the state wants to get rid of MediCal docs." [See CounterPunch 8/18/04] In its April 2005 "Action Report," the Medical Board published the following re Wolman's license status: "Violated the terms and conditions of his [sic] board-ordered probation by failing to enroll in a clinical education program and failing to pay cost recovery and probation monitoring fees. Revoked, stayed, given an additional year of probation... with terms including, but not limited to, obtaining a practice/billing monitor; prohibited from ordering prescribing dispensing, administering or possessing any controlled substances except those on Schedules III, IV, and V and the ADD medications Ritalin and Adderal; and prohibited from issuing an oral or written recommendation or approval for marijuana." Asked why she accepted such an onerous deal, Wolman told a colleague, "The Medical Board presented it to me after I completed the PACE [Continuing Education] program and regained my license (which was suspended because I failed to complete PACE within the first 6 months of probation- couldn't afford it). I was told to sign it or lose my license again. I had no attorney -I was more broke than ever after borrowing $10,000 for PACE, which was a joke- and not being able to work for two months. I approached several to ask for help with the marijuana clause, but none was willing to take on the situation pro bono." The Medical Board is the state agency that licenses doctors and other healthcare practitioners. Twelve of its 21 members are MDs appointed by the governor to four-year terms. The Board's staff includes about 100 career investigators and more than 100 office workers. As in other government agencies, there are complicated power relations between those formally in charge (who come and go over the years) and those who do the day-in, day-out work (and will unto retirement). Tod Mikuriya, MD, and about two-thirds of his colleagues in the Society of Cannabis Clinicians have been investigated by the Board and forced to live under a shadow of fear while mounting costly, time-consuming responses. None of the complaints against Mikuriya (or any of the SCC doctors) came from patients or loved ones or caregivers acting on behalf of patients; they all came from law enforcement officers, and not one even alleged harm to a patient! Nevertheless, the Board called in the Attorney General to formally charge Mikuriya with violating a vaguely defined "standard of care." His record keeping was deemed inadequate by an administrative law judge and he is currently on probation. In response to this pattern of persecution, Frank Lucido, MD, one of the cannabis specialists investigated by the Board, began attending quarterly meetings of the Board and writing them up in the SCC journal, O'Shaughnessy's, and on a website, MedicalBoardWatch.com. Lucido has been trying to teach the Board members some of the things they didn't learn about cannabis in medical school. To this end he asked Tom O'Connell, MD, to address the Spring meeting, which was held at the Embassy Suites hotel near the San Francisco airport. (God knows how much business gets conducted in such venues. The businessmen and women fly in, check into the hotel, hold their important meetings, and fly back to headquarters. Good thing we have an infinite supply of fuel and all those humble, brown-skinned people to keep the buffet refilled.) O'Connell, 72, has silver hair which he wears shoulder-length, dark eyes, and a serious manner. He had a full career as a thoracic surgeon (including 13 years in the U.S. Army) then came out of retirement to start examining people seeking approval to medicate with cannabis. O'Connell's data show that many of the seemingly able-bodied young men who patronize Bay Area cannabis clubs are self-medicating for stress and depression and, in the process, reducing their use of alcohol and tobacco. His manner, in addressing the Board, was colleague-to-colleague. Dr. O'Connell's Commentary: After I began screening cannabis applicants in late 2001, the discovery that nearly all were already chronic users who had originally tried it during adolescence -at about the same time most had also tried alcohol and tobacco- led me to develop a structured interview aimed at a better understanding of that same self-medication phenomenon. Over three thousand such encounters have now been recorded and enough data from over 1200 structured interviews has been analyzed to permit the admittedly startling conclusions I will share with you this morning: 1) Demographic data amply confirm that a vigorous illegal "marijuana" market didn't begin until cannabis was first made available to large numbers of adolescents and young adults during the 'hippie' phenomenon of the late Sixties. 2) The subsequent sustained growth of that illegal market, although difficult to measure precisely, is widely acknowledged. Those same applicant demographics also suggest that the continued growth has resulted from chronic use by an unknown fraction of the teen initiates faithfully tracked by annual federal surveys since 1975. 3) The striking temporal association between initiation of cannabis on the one hand, and tobacco and alcohol on the other, first noted by researchers in the early Seventies was confirmed; however, the "sequence" they also noted in which cannabis was usually the third agent tried no longer obtains. All three are now tried at similar ages, and in random order. 4) Those findings, together with an almost universal acknowledgement of similar emotional symptoms, suggests that rather than acting as a "gateway" to other drugs, cannabis has, since the late Sixties, become a third agent tried unwittingly along with alcohol and tobacco by troubled adolescents-- and for similar emotional symptoms. In other words, what the three agents have in common is an ability to treat symptoms of adolescent angst and dysphoria; and thus function as self-medications. 5) That interpretation is further supported by several other findings developed by systematic inquiries into their family and school experiences -plus their initiations of a menu other illegal drugs- including both psychedelics and "street" drugs. 6) There is also startling yet conclusive evidence that once they had settled on cannabis as their self-medication of choice, this population then dramatically diminished its consumption of both alcohol and tobacco in sustained fashion. Federal statistics gathered since 1970 also show a gradual parallel decrease in the consumption of both-- plus some related improvements in health outcomes. 7) The bottom line seems to be that in addition to its better-known ability to relieve several somatic symptoms, cannabis has also been a beneficial psychotropic medication for many of its chronic users since their adolescence. This unique clinical evidence also suggests that cannabis was a benign and safe anxiolytic/antidepressant long before any pharmaceutical agents were even available for those purposes, and that it still outperforms most of them in both efficacy and safety. This evidence further suggests that current attitudes toward cannabis are not only profoundly mistaken; but that continued aggressive prohibition inflicts great damage on both individuals and society. My primary reason for sharing this information with you at this early phase is precisely because it is so radically at odds with both official policy and popular beliefs; a collateral reason is to point out that gathering such data wasn't even possible until 215 was passed. Finally, because the 'medical marijuana' laws passed by other states have been so restrictive, the acquisition of such data has only been possible in California. Fred Gardner can be reached at journal@ccrmg.org