Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
January 22
/ 24, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Prince
Harry's Travails
January 21,
2005
Dave Lindorff
A
Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)
Sharon Smith
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria
Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration
Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert
Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services
Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
How
the Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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.
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Weekend Edition
January 22 / 24, 2005
No One Wants to Talk to Cindy Sheehan on Inauguration
Day (Or Any Other)
The
Spectacle
By
STAN GOFF
Back in Raleigh now, and I can't shake
the feeling that I've spent the last two days in a dream.
Arrive in DC on the morning of the 19th, and we are hit with
horizontal snow and a Siberian wind chill, worse because we are
standing in LBJ park taking cover on the leeward sides of the
big oaks while our Gold Star families talk to the press. Military
Families Speak Out has gathered ten family members widows,
sisters, dads, aunts, grandmothers of those killed in Iraq.
One was killed a year later when he pulled his own trigger at
the end of a post-traumatic spiral. His sister said he couldn't
quit talking about a fellow troop who slit the throat of an Iraqi
girl. Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in an ambush last
April, seems positively normal until she is asked to relive the
moment she first saw the military sedan in front of her house
with the three men in uniform. Then her breath is taken away
again by that moment of terrible recognition, and she sobs.
Across the foot bridge is the North parking lot of the Pentagon.
The Gold Star families have written the Secretary of Defense
time and again requesting a meeting. They want to ask him to
explain why their loved ones had to die. No reply, of course.
So today they with a few others of us who still have living
family members in the service will walk across that foot
bridge and keep going toward Rumsfeld's office until we are stopped.
We are halfway across the bridge before we can see through the
driving snow that there is a phalanx of black clad, armed and
body-armored police waiting for us, the blue lights whipping
around on top of their cruisers. Someone has monitored our emails.
When the treacherous dads and grandmothers approach and attempt
to negotiate entry, the burly African American police spokesperson
seems embarrassed and discomfited by the little drama. He's
 been sent out here to the
far reaches of a giant, empty parking lot in a snow storm to
handle a situation that is pregnant with "political sensitivity,"
and he's been given not an ounce of useful guidance. At one
point, he apologetically dissembles, saying that they didn't
even know we were coming. Our delegation can't suppress a little
sardonic laughter over that one.
The bereaved finally leave a stack of 8 x 10 color photos of
the dead boys taken while they were alive, posed in uniform
and ask the cop to try and ensure the delivery of the snow-wet
portraits to the Office of the Secretary of Defense of the United
States of America.
Later, at St. Aloysius Church, as we shake the snow off our outer
garments and the blood rushes back into our frozen peripheries
and we settle into chairs with hot coffee, a kind of sleepy thaw-torpor
comes over us.
The next day inauguration day I give a brief speech
at Malcolm X Park. My comment that war-supporting John Kerry
can go straight to hell with this administration hits two nerves,
and a grumble harmonizes with the wild shrieks of approval, the
former coming from David Cobb and his entourage of feint-hearted
Greens. The "go to hell, John" crowd is far and away
the majority, and the best sign I see all day is there: "I
voted for Kerry, and now I'm carrying this fucking sign."
The DC Anti-War Network (DAWN), who organized the rally, is
almost three thousand strong when they march away. At the end
of the march they carry dozens of flag-draped coffins.
I begin working my way back to a checkpoint at D Street and 7th,
where I will try to join the "Turn Your Back on Bush"
contingent of military families and vets who have staked out
a position along the parade route near Mellon Memorial Fountain.
On the way, I drop into Harry's Hotel to grab coffee and a sandwich
at the bar. The place is infested with expensively clad white
people, and brown people are waiting on them. Today is a good
day for both. The white people have their leader to celebrate,
and the brown people are making out on tips. On the television
above the bar, though, CNN plays. CNN was almost in the direct
employ of Donald Rumsfeld in the past, and is trying today to
pretend that this inauguration is some momentous event. Still
they still get a report from Christiana Amanpour in Iraq, in
which the British-Iranian airline heiress and CNN war-zone correspondent
uses two D-words to describe the situation there disaster
and debacle.
The crowd in the restaurant-bar become momentarily still. It's
like someone farted. When the smiling reporters reappear on
the big screen to cover the coronation again, everyone relaxes,
and they go back to their five-dollar bottles of exotic beer
and their coffee and their Pinot Noir.
I leave having caught bits and pieces from the TV of the whole
weird spectacle. Encrypted in the speeches is a state of general
war on all who fail to obey. Caligula.
There is to be an Uncle Tom Gala featuring Armstrong Williams,
where the Party of White Supremacy can take a moment to fawn
over beaming black reactionaries and trump the brain-dead "cherish
diversity" liberals of "the opposition." "Massa
loves my ass" confronts the cherish-diversity liberals with
a stark fact of history; the planter aristocracy cherished the
fuck out of diversity. It was the plantation demographic.
In the street, a smug triumphalism emanates from the wind-bitten
Anglo-Saxon cheeks of Republican patriarchs in their thousand
dollar coats. Clutching their arms to balance on spiked heels
are their chinchilla and mink clad mates the Prozac and
anticipation of the days events have given them a slightly crazed
and euphoric look. I remember that look from my youth when my
siblings and I would hide in the woods to watch Pentecostal tent
revivals. But the country women at the tent revivals had no
minks, and they couldn't match the hair products that are in
evidence here today. I'm thinking that the hair of Republican
women could stop a nine-millimeter round. Maybe it's an additional
security measure.
There is a cordon around the parade route to keep back any threats
to the spectacle. There is a personal cordon around each of
the intoxicated participants; little force fields that filter
their backgrounds. They can hear the marching bands and the
tittering of their fellow white nationalists, but they can't
seem to hear that incessant backdrop of helicopters and sirens
that for me, at least gives the whole scene an air
of apocalyptic science fiction. They see the capital dome in
the distance, but they don't see the freezing beggars they bypass
or the sleeping homeless bodies buried under mounds of cast-off
clothing in the alcoves.
There is no way I'm getting through the checkpoint. There are
thousands waiting at the little bottleneck, many with inauguration
tickets that won't magic-carpet them through the team of over-worked
cops who are checking every jacket, every bag, every pair of
shoes. This has forced the exultant Republicans to mingle with
legions of protesters. Outside the cordon, the numbers of protesters
almost match that of the Buffoon-worshippers.
Ever so often, something about being logjammed together with
the protesters inexplicably penetrates and disrupts the happy-happy
force-field, and one of them will snap. Then their eyes flash
with the strange breathless rage that only an assault on illusion
engenders. A blue-haired matron seems suddenly overcome with
it when she marches straight up to a 30-ish woman standing in
an unobstructed and unobstructing spot with a sign that says,
"Bush Lied." The old woman's eyes are alight with
frustration (and fear!) when she scolds the younger woman for
"violating my right to see my president." The younger
woman says she isn't stopping anyone from doing anything
that the police are but the invisible armor comes back
up and the blue-hair suddenly can't hear anything but marching
bands again as she stalks away. Perhaps she had eaten earlier
at Harry's and is still seething about Amanpour's less than glowing
description of her Idiot Prince's liberty-bearing crusade in
Mesopotamia.
I've seen enough. I have another speech to give to a collection
of lefties tonight, where I will ask them to come to Fayetteville
on the 19th of March. But I've hit the wall in some sense, watching
that unstable little old woman and these insufferably ignorant
and arrogant white men in their thousand dollar coats, and the
dead chinchilla parade, and the whole spectacle that now unaccountably
calls up the image in my head of fat growing around someone's
heart.
Everyone hates a party-pooper.
No one wants to talk to Cindy Sheehan. No one wants to see her
weep. No one wants to smell the bodies under the rubble in Fallujah.
No one wants to know about the furious masses around the world
that will make a mockery of this whole futile exhibition.
That's our job now, I'm thinking. To make them see what they
don't want to see.
Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous
Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti"
(Soft Skull Press, 2000) and "Full
Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He
is a member of the BRING
THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee. His periodic essays
on the military can be found at http://www.freedomroad.org/home.html.
Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
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