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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 July 9 / 10, 2005 Sheldon Rampton Rhetoric vs. Reality in London July 8, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Blowback Hits Britain: Londoners Pay Heavy Price for Blair's Deception Tariq Ali The London Bombings: Why They Happened Monica Benderman One Soldier's Fight to Legalize Morality Rick Jahnkow Beyond Opt-Out: the Counter-Recruitment Movement Christopher Brauchli Dear Vet: If You Want to Eat While You Recuperate, You Gotta Pay Extra Kim Peterson Bombs in the Underground: Terror Begats Terror Joshua Frank Leakers and Liars: Inching Toward Indictments? Norman Solomon Messages from the Carnage Website of the Day An Interview with Ray McGovern   July 7, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr John Walsh More Hawkish Than Bush: Dems in Full Battle Cry Mike Marqusee Message from London Gilad Atzmon London's Burning Nicole Colson Showdown at the Supreme Court Jack Random Judith Miller, Anti-Hero Norman Solomon Judith Miller, Drum Majorette for War Len Colodny Is Bob Woodward Still Protecting Al Haig? Cockburn / St. Clair Judy Miller: the Luckiest Martyr   July 6, 2005 Elaine Cassel Political Necrophilia in Florida: Jeb Bush and Terri Schiavo, a Strange Affair Sean Donahue Why the G8 Debt Relief Plan Won't Help Nicaragua's Poor Jeremy R. Hammond State Sponsors of Terrorism, Applying the US Standard Joshua Frank Will Rove be Indicted? Ali Khan The "Gift" of US Democratization Michael Dickinson Billy Graham's Final Crusade: Blessed are the Warmakers Norman Solomon How to Plunge Deeper into a Quagmire: Withdrawal and US Credibility Dave Zirin Triumph of the Shrill: Tony Blair's Olympiad Gary Leupp Accusing Ahmadinejad Website of the Day Humiliation in Baghdad: "Not Something We Would Do"     July 5, 2005 Behrooz Ghamari What's the Matter with Iran?: How the Reformists Lost the Presidency Elaine Cassel Why This Progressive Will Miss Sandra Day O'Connor Ron Jacobs Robert and Mabel Williams's Great Fight for Justice Bob Libal The Right's Assault on Academia Dr. Peter Rost Mea Culpa from a Big Pharma CEO Mark Engler The Big Debt Deal: Where's the Jubilee? Gideon Levy They Broke the Public's Heart Dave Zirin The Great Olympics Scam Sameer Dossani The Trouble with Gleneagles   July 2 / 4, 2005 Alexander Cockburn "Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi? Lenni Brenner Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July Laura Carlsen Zapatista's Red Alert James Petras The Pretensions of Neoliberalism: Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment William A. Cook Kings of Serpents Brian Cloughley Quagmire of the Vanities Saul Landau The Mass Media, Symbols and Ownership Tom Crumpacker Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles? Greg Moses Dylan's America Dr. Susan Block My Adelphia Story: a Tale of Censorship, Fraud, Christian Family Values and Really Lousy Cable Service Fran Shor Disassembling Bush's Iraq War: Liberated into a No Man's Land Fred Gardner Study: Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer Moshe Adler The New London Case: Corporate Giveaways That Destroy Communities, But Don't Create Jobs David Model The Downing Street Memo: So What's New? Seth Sandronsky California Spying, Schwarzenegger-Style Ramzy Baroud Managed Democracy in the Middle East Suzan Mazur Frank Carlucci the First: the "Sublime Prince" of Scranton Ben Tripp Voltaire, I Can Dig Your Rap Justin Taylor Faux Biography and the Pleasures of "Lint" Brendan Bailey Mesh Caps, Vice Magazine and the Trouble with Irony Poets' Basement Albert, Engel and Louise Website of the Weekend Radical Reference   July 1, 2005 Christopher Brauchli With Friends Like These: Bush Buddies Karimov and Musharraf Pat Williams What Real Westerners Think About Bush's Pseudo-Cowboy Palaver Gary Leupp Summer Surprise? John Stauber Mad Cow in America: the USDA Continues to Lie John Chuckman The Blessings of Canada Justicia y Paz Colombia's Disappeared: Their Names, At Least! Cockburn / St. Clair It's Put Up or Shut Up for Bush and the Dems on the Supreme Court   June 30, 2005 Kathy Kelly An Open Letter to Carl Levin: Compassion for Iraqis John Stauber Oprah Not the "Only" Mad Cow in America Virginia Rodino All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Unity in the Anti-War Movement Jason Leopold Meet the New Chair of the FERC: James Kelliher, the Man Who Invited Enron to Write Bush's Energy Policy Dave Lindorff What Was Bush Thinking? Greg Moses Racism at Cape Cod Norman Solomon Memo to the Iraq War Joshua Frank Israel's Theocrats Alexander Cockburn The Political Function of PBS   June 29, 2005 Mike Schaefer How the Washington Post Lied About Its Own War Poll Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor Bush's Big Democratic Hoax in Iraq Sharon Smith Democrats Shift into Reverse Sam Husseini A Quick Way to End the Insurgency John Stauber Put a Photo of Mad Cow #2 on a Milk Carton Ahmad Faruqui Is Militarism Irreversible in Pakistan? Linda S. Heard Bush's Speech: the View from Cairo Stew Albert Chet Helms: a Rock and Roll Hero Ray McGovern Bush at Ft. Bragg: Stay the Crooked Course     June 28, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts A Defeat Bred in Deceit Landau / Hassen Bush's Meddling in Internal Syrian Politics John A. Murphy Keeping Nader Off the Ballot: an Analysis of Political Profiling in Pennsylvania Mike Whitney More Lies from Rumsfeld: Those "Meetings" with Insurgents CounterPunch News Service JFK on Staying in Vietnam: Is Bush Reading from Kennedy's Playbook? Dave Zirin Pining for the Pistons Dave Lindorff Showtime in Washington Patrick Cockburn Iraq: a Bloody Mess     June 27, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Blood Sacrifices for Empty Slogans Mike Marqusee G8: Who are the Hijackers? Mark Scaramella When a Corporate Raider Claims Economic Hardship: the Court-Approved Lies of Charles Hurwitz Leigh Saavedra Press Apologists for Torture Kathy Kelly Where is the UN? June 25 / 26, 2005 Alexander Cockburn The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals Jennifer Van Bergen America's Parallel Legal Systems George Corsetti This Land is Their Land: Condemnation for Corporations Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer Let's Open the Gulag: a People's Mission to Gitmo Kevin Zeese Counter-Recruitment: How to Keep the Military From Getting their Hands on Your Kids P. Sainath Russian Roulette in Vidharbha John Stauber How to Bury a Mad Cow Scott Handleman Gay in the Third World Tom Barry The Politics & Ideologies of the Anti-Immigrationists John Walsh Looking for Peace in All the Wrong Places Justin E.H. Smith The Hairless Apes of Kansas vs. the Reality-Based Community: Why Progressives Have a Stake in the War on Evolution Alan Wallis The Story of Pinky: the Drug Trade in My Neighborhood Ben Tripp Negative Space: an Artful Lesson Frederick B. Hudson Songs to Lose Your Loneliness By: the Raised Voices of Sweet Honey in the Rock Poets' Basement Gaffney, Engel, Davies, and Albert     June 24, 2005 Ray McGovern The Downing St. Fixation: Fixing to Fix "Fixed" Jorge Mariscal "They Only Call Us Americans When They Need Us for War": the Paradox of Mexican Americans in Iraq Desiree Hellegers Portland vs. the FBI Zeynep Toufe What Do the American People Know and When Did They Know It? Joshua Frank Call Him Senator Con Job David Lindorff Which Flag Would Jesus Burn? Michael Neumann Victory and Recruitment Website of the Day Gagging Dr. Dean June 23, 2005 Christopher Brauchli Thomas Griffith and Rule 49: He Practiced Law Without a License; Now He's a Federal Appeals Court Judge Clay Conrad Killing Off the Jury with Tort Reform Standard Schaefer A Retort to Military Neo-Liberalism P. Sainath Vidharbha: No rains and 116F, But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks Mark Engler CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death Norman Solomon Voluntary Amnesia in America Cockburn / St. Clair Frank Calzon Kathy Kelly Where You Stand Determines What You See   June 22, 2005 Kevin Zeese The Bush Administration's Psy-Ops on the American Public: an Interview with Col. Sam Gardiner William S. Lind Afghanistan: the Other War Arsalan Iftikhar Patriots Against the PATRIOT Act Dan Nagengast Give Populism a Chance: From France to Kansas David Krieger To the Graduates: We Live in an Interdependent World Kathleen & Bill Christison Tempest in Santa Fe: Confronting Israeli Myth-making     June 21, 2005 Brian Cloughley Destroy the Unbelievers! Mike Whitney President Disconnect Dave Lindorff Who Needs Big Bird, Anyway? Mark Weisbrot Bush's Lonely Campaign Against Hugo Chavez Matthew R. Simmons The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis Dave Zirin The Crass Slipper Fits: Ron Howard's Terrible "Cinderella Man" Virginia Rodino The Anti-War Movement and Impeachment Paul Craig Roberts A War Waged by Liars and Morons   June 20, 2005 Alan Maass The GM Job Massacre Tariq Ali To the Gates of the Gleneagles Hotel! Mickey Z. WMDs American-Style: It's 60 Years Since Alamogordo William Blum Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends Gary Leupp Old News Indeed: In 1999, Bush Craved Chance to Attack Iraq Jason Leopold Someone Tell Bush Iraq Wasn't Behind 9/11, Before He Starts Another War Dave Lindorff Why the Media Should be Schiavo'd Alan Maass The GM Job Massacre Uri Avnery Condi and Hamas Website of the Day Crimes Against Poetry                                                                               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

July 9 / 10, 2005 Pot Shots Sentencing Season By FRED GARDNER Robert "Duke" Schmidt has been sentenced to 41 months in federal prison for growing and distributing marijuana. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer meted out the terms in his San Francisco courtroom July 7. Schmidt reports to the Bureau of Prisons Sept. 1. He is one of about 30 West Coast medical-marijuana growers, distributors and/or users whose cases had been put on hold pending the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Gonzales v. Raich. Schmidt first appeared before Breyer in March 2003, soon after Ed Rosenthal's widely publicized trial. Although Rosenthal had faced similar charges, he received a one-day sentence, time served. What was different about Schmidt's case? In 1999, Schmidt had founded a non-profit dispensary, Genesis 1:29, which he ran out of his home in Petaluma. As membership grew, he supplemented his homegrown with cannabis produced at other sites. Schmidt says his goal was to develop standardized plant strains with known cannabinoid contents and study their effects on patients with various conditions. As he put it in one of several applications filed with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, "It is the intent of Genesis Research Group to develop well characterized drug substance and document patient input to develop efficacy correlations between the chemical components of the cannabis plant for different clinical indications." Schmidt was inspired to seek DEA approval after learning about Registration Form 225. "It's an application to manufacture and distribute scheduled drugs," explained Schmidt in a March 2003 interview. "I filed an application, and the DEA issued me a receipt." Schmidt said he also informed the state Attorney General's office of his activities. "For three seasons I told them in advance what I was going to plant, I updated them during the growing season, and I reported how much I harvested." The DEA raided Schmidt's house in the early morning hours of Sept. 12, 2002. Schmidt, a small, wiry man in 50s, attempted to wrestle the rifle away from the agent who had awakened him with a prod of the barrel -for which he is also charged with assault on an officer in the line of duty. "My post-traumatic stress disorder is triggered by having guns pointed at me," said Schmidt, "especially when I'm woke up with one in my face." The DEA also confiscated 2,600 plants from a site Schmidt leased in Sebastopol. The jury that found Ed Rosenthal guilty of cultivation (as well as conspiracy and maintaining a grow-op) determined the amount to be not 3,000+ plants, as alleged by the feds, but fewer than 100, which carried "only" a five-year mandatory minimum. Ed's lawyers had challenged the number of rooted plants seized at his warehouse, and the definition of a viable plant. But whereas Ed was growing cloned seedlings, Schmidt was growing big, healthy outdoor plants. "The place looked like a Christmas tree farm," he recalled with some pride. Ed, by dint of his savvy and status as a writer/publisher, and his connections, and his fundraising ability, and his family and extensive support system, had unique resources to bring to his court fight. Also, Ed was a nonviolent first offender, somebody about whom jurors could declare, "Ed Rosenthal is not a criminal." "Duke" Schmidt, however, did not have a middle-class aura or a private-sector lawyer, and he had, in fact, done time in federal prison. Schmidt was born and raised on Put In Island in Lake Erie. His father was a tugboat captain, then a boatbuilder. "Boats were second nature to me," says Schmidt. "The sea, no matter how bad it got in a storm, I knew how to work a boat through it." He was turned on to marijuana in the late '60s by Midwest college students vacationing at Great Lakes resorts. He helped ferry a few of them to Canada (instead of Vietnam). Somebody suggested that his skills could be put to use bringing marijuana in from Colombia, and he eventually did, making regular runs to Florida and Louisiana. "It was a mistake of youth and I know it, and I've paid my debt to society," said Schmidt in '03. "All I can say in my own defense is that I was offered a lot of money to run guns, and more money to run cocaine, to run heroin, and I always turned it down. My interest was always marijuana." Schmidt remembers the Paraquat days: "In 1978 there was more than 12 million acres of land in South America growing the finest cannabis sativa. One morning when we were loading up and getting it ready for transport to the coast, we noticed a lot of American C-140 aircraft flying overhead. Then the sky became orange, the whole valley was orange with the defoliant they were dropping. We had a DC-3 there and the wings were so heavy with this spray that it would not lift off. We pulled our t-shirts over our heads, we grabbed what stuff we had baled up, and we made it to the coast. It took us four days overland. When I got back to the United States I asked, 'When did we declare war on Colombia?' Everybody was wondering what I was talking about... That area now is all heroin fields and coca fields." Schmidt pled guilty to bringing in 2,780,000 pounds of marijuana between 1973 and '78. He did only two years at a federal penitentiary in Michigan because he could trade something the government wanted: knowledge of how he had avoided them on the high seas. (He had a scanner monitoring every Coast Guard cutter, and when they headed into port, he shot over their wake.) Given his prior conviction and facing a mandatory minimum of 20 years, Schmidt accepted the federal public defender's advice and pled guilty before Breyer to a charge of maintaining a place for the manufacture of marijuana, which carried a five-year maximum. The sentencing phase was put off until the Raich decision came down. Schmidt expresses no animosity towards Breyer. "I was hoping for less time, of course," he said July 8, "but his hands were tied. Judges don't have much leeway, even under the Booker decision." Schmidt has no forgiveness for his prosecutors, who, he says, "made false allegations, including that I had children working for me." Schmidt, a true believer, reiterates his original rationale for Genesis:129 -de facto approval from the DEA. "I registered with the federal government and they cashed my check for three years. This is what I get for complying with the law. This is an allowable issue, otherwise the University of Mississippi wouldn't be growing marijuana and the University of Massachusetts wouldn't be arguing for the right to do so with help from the ACLU. I was trying to run a bona fide research facility with 1500 patients. The federal government has seven patients left in their research program. Who had the broader platform?"   Support Requested Among the defendants whose cases will move forward now that the Supreme Court has ruled on Raich are two growers who were released from prison pending the outcome, Bryan Epis and Keith Alden. Epis, who helped launch a dispensary in Chico after Prop 215 passed in 1996, was convicted in September '02 of cultivating more than 1,000 plants. He was given a 53-month sentence by U.S. District Judge Frank Damrell. He served 22 months before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals directed that he be let out on bail. Epis will be re-sentenced bu Damrell August 1. The U.S. Attorney's office is asking that the full sentence be re-imposed. Attorney Brenda Grantland is hoping that letters from people who know Epis will convince Damrell that her client "is not a typical commercial pot grower." She's also urging medical cannabis users who can give concrete examples of its efficacy to write The Honorable Frank C. Damrell, Jr., U.S. District Court, 501 I Street, Suite 4-200, Sacramento, CA 95814. Keith Alden of Windsor (Sonoma County) served 20 months of a 44-month sentence for cultivation before being released on bail in April 2004. His sentence is on appeal before the 9th Circuit. Letters of support for Alden should go to Cathy Catterson, Clerk of the Court, U.S. Court of Appeals Ninth Circuit, P.O. Box 193939, San Francisco, CA 94119. Form letters are available at www.commonsenselaw.com WAMM -the Wo/Men's Alliance for Medical Marijuana, a Santa Cruz collective whose directors, Mike and Valerie Corral, were arrested by the DEA in September 2002- will hold a march July 16 as "a preemptive attempt to influence the perception of the federal government." Supporters are invited to assemble at 11 a.m. at the corner of Pacific and Cathcart streets. For details contact Mimi Hill (831) 425-0580 or visit www.wamm.org. WAMM is hoping for a serious show of support -1,000 people or more. Be there or be in DARE. Fred Gardner can be reached at journal@ccrmg.org