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How a Tiny Alaskan Indian Tribe Got Billions in Pentagon Contracts by Jeffrey St. Clair; Dems and Dives by Alexander Cockburn; Spooky Grants: More on the CIA's Recruitment of Campus Professors by David Price. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories April 2 / 3, 2005 Alexander Cockburn April 1, 2005 Tom Barry Rahul Mahajan Charlie Cray
/ Jim Vallette Dave Lindorff Zeynep Toufe Suzan Mazur Michael Dickinson Stan Cox Ra Ravishankar Daniel Wolff
March 31, 2005 Sharon Smith Ron Jacobs Tariq Ali Michael Dickinson Kanak Mani
Dixit Mitchell Zimmerman Xuan-Trang
Ho Dave Zirin Joe Bageant Jeff Halper Website of
the Day
March 30, 2005 Gary Leupp Ralph Nader
/ Kevin Zeese Chase Madar Toni Solo Jackie Corr Ahmad Faruqui Mike Roselle Jude Wanniski Francis A.
Boyle Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of
the Day
March 29, 2005 Ralph Nader Gary Leupp Sonia Cardenas Stew Albert Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Carl G. Estabrook
March 28, 2005 Jeremy Scahill Sonali Kolhatkar Sasha Kramer Kevin Zeese Tom Stephens Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Newton Garver Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
March 26 / 27, 2005 Gary Leupp Peter Linebaugh Marc Robert Laura Carlsen Saul Landau
/ Puja Patel Dave Foreman Fred Gardner Jennifer Matsui Dave Lindorff Dharma Adhikari Joshua Frank Patrick Barr Christopher
Brauchli Ramzy Baroud Jackie Corr Ben Tripp Dr. Susan Block Mickey Z. Justin Taylor Richard Joseph Poets' Basement
March 25, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons Yoshie Furuhashi Pat Williams Mark Engler Rahul Mahajan Lance Selfa Ralph Nader John R. Llewellyn Jo Guldi
March 24, 2005 Joshua Frank Talli Nauman Martin Espada Dave Lindorff Elaine Cassel Jack McCarthy Jack Random Barbara Ferguson Suzan Mazur Dorreen Yellow Bird Andrew Wimmer
and Mark Chmiel
Patrick Bond Mike Whitney Becky White Michael Donnelly Niranjan Ramakrishnan Ashley Smith David Swanson Derrick O'Keefe Paul A. Moore Dalton Walker Patrick Cockburn
March 22, 2005 William Blum Jim Vallette Greg Moses John Farley Ron Jacobs M. Junaid Alam Rep. Cynthia
McKinney Dave Lindorff James Petras
March 21, 2005 John Walsh Werther Mike Stark David Swanson James T. Phillips Mike Ferner Robert Jensen Paul Craig
Roberts Stew Albert Website of
the Day
March 19, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Tom Reeves Saul Landau Alan Maass Ron Jacobs David Green John Blair Steve Greenfield Ben Tripp Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Sarah Schaffer Warren Hastings Poets' Basement
March 18, 2005 Dave Zirin Richard Thieme John Walsh David Swanson Ben Terrall David Boyle Dorreen Yellow Bird Mokhiber /
Weissman Greg Moses Website of
the Day
March 17, 2005 Christopher
Brauchli Bill Quigley Brian Cloughley Gary Bass / Adam Hughes Dave Lindorff Jude Wanniski Alexander Billet John Ross Website of the Day
March 16, 2005 Ralph Nader William Cook Kevin Zeese Jackie Corr Alan Maass David R. Kolker Cindy Ellen
Hill Paul Craig
Roberts
March 15, 2005 Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Hadas Their
/ Katrina Yeaw Alison Weir Matt Koehler Evelyn Pringle Harry Browne
March 14, 2005 Ralph Nader David Miller Stan Cox Mike Roselle David Swanson Simona Sharoni Dave Lindorff Dorreen Yellow Bird Tom Barry Website of the Day
March 12 / 13, 2005 David H. Price Noam Chomsky Laura Carlsen Stan Goff Valentina Nicoli Michael Leonardi Saul Landau
/ Sarah Anderson Joe Bageant Manuel García,
Jr. Greg Moses James J. Brittain Ben Tripp Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Walter Brasch Ramzy Baroud Christopher
Brauchli Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Richard Oxman Poets' Basement
March 11, 2005 Jerry Fresia Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff William James
Martin Muqtedar Khan Kathryn Ledebur Mike Whitney Dave Zirin Website of the Day
March 10, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts John Marc Leas, Colleen McLaughlin
and Ashley Smith Larry Birns Michael Donnelly Luis Gomez Jackie Corr Uri Avnery Website of the Day
March 9, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair Ward Churchill Robert Fisk Bernice Powell Jackson Mickey Z. Dave Zirin Michael Donnelly James Reiss Vijay Prashad
March 8, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Fisk Kurt Nimmo Suzan Mazur Evelyn Pringle Giuliana Sgrena Elaine Cassel
March 7, 2005 Dave Zirin Brian Cloughley John Chuckman Mike Whitney Mark Weisbrot Fred Gardner Richard Neville Uri Avnery
March 5 / 6, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Tom Reeves Jenna Orkin Tom Barry Joshua Frank Moshe Adler Jane Stillwater Omar Barghouti / Jacqueline
Sfeir Christopher
Brauchli John Pilger Raúl
Zibechi David Krieger Three Takes on Nepal Surendra R. Devkota Bhishma Karki Joseph Pietri Ben Tripp Poets' Basement Website of
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March 4, 2005 Frederick Hudson
March 3, 2005 Pat Williams Brian Cloughley Dave Lindorff Amira Hass Greg Moses Lynne Landes Nelson P. Valdés John Ross
March 2, 2005 Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Mike Roselle M. Junaid Alam Suzan Mazur Jackson Thoreau Michael Donnelly Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of the Day
March 1, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons David Lindorff Patrick Cockburn
/ David Enders Ron Jacobs Tanya Garcia Joseph Pietri Kona Lowell Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
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Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
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Weekend Edition Operation (Un)TruthA Trojan Jackass for the Anti-War MovementBy STAN GOFF Fayetteville, North Carolina
Everyone knows the story of the Trojan Horse. An act of friendship used to smuggle the enemy force inside your gates. Actually, that's the dumbed down version. The Greeks led the Trojans to believe that the great wooden horse was a Greek war offering to Athena, alleging it had been abandoned on the battlefield. The Greeks left a soldier behind, pretending he was now a non-combatant, to convince the Trojans that if they didn't carry the ligneous steed back into fortified Troy, the Trojans themselves would risk the wrath of the goddess Athena. It's a better story this way. Maybe it's a more apt metaphor, too, for what Paul Rieckhoff and "Operation Truth" are up to with the antiwar movement. Paul Rieckhoff, a former first-looey in the Reserves who went to Iraq, has now found his political niche as a plant for the Democratic Party, using his outfit's non-profit status to give him plausible deniability. The NGO in question is Operation Truth, which has somehow managed to pass itself off as an antiwar group every since its inception while explicitly not taking a position against the war. It's a little like calling Camille Paglia a feminist or James Carville a leftist. Say it a couple of times in the press and its riveted together in the public consciousness. Feminist Camille Paglia... "from the left, James Carville." Basically, people can get away with any damn thing these days, or think they can. Not this, though. Let me be frank. Operation Truth is a sham, and it's staff commandant is a jackass. Just so no one tries to attribute my remarks to anyone or any organization or any campaign I might be in now, or any in the future, I say again... I am speaking for myself. I have a number of friends and colleagues who are a good deal more diplomatic than I am that can speak for their organizations. But after Reickhoff's creepy little attack on the Fayetteville, North Carolina antiwar action of March 19th , I can hold my tongue no longer on either Rieckhoff or the attempt by the operatives of liberal imperialism more generally to blunt the sharpening anti-imperial edge of the broad movement against the Mesopotamian misadventure. Let me reiterate again that I am speaking for myself, personally, representing no organization... so no one like Rieckhoff can attribute anything I say to any of my allies in any current or campaign within the antiwar movement. I'm speaking for myself as an unabashed leftist -- that's someone who opposes capitalism, in case this term is confusing. (James Carville is not a leftist. He is an obnoxious asshole, which is just one current within the Democratic Party... the Republicans have a lot of obnoxious assholes, too.) Leftism is part of the broad antiwar movement, openly so, and we argue openly for our position: that capitalism as a system, and not some moral or intellectual failure, causes these wars. My reaction here doesn't only include Operation Truth, but the Education for Peace in Iraq Center (EPIC), and all the rest of these bombardier-liberal shills. I haven't gotten ugly with any of them in public in the past because they were still mixed in with us when the pre-2004-election antiwar efforts were homogenized within a movement that was not antiwar, but anti-Bush. And this is the first time they have very publicly attacked those of us who are organizing among military families, veterans, and GI's. Just two weeks ago, Operation Truth's Rieckhoff launched a full frontal bullshit assault against that action in the press saying, "If you support the troops, don't protest them in their backyards -- especially not as they're sent to war or returning home." Of course, the entire call-up for that event was painfully clear from the very beginning that this was not a protest "against troops," which is a red herring in any case, and the speaker line-up was ponderously heaped with the families of military members, veterans, and the surviving families of the war dead. Rieckhoff knew this, and he lied about the character of the demo anyway. Anyone who cares to search Rieckhoff's Operation Truth website, by the way, hungry for a single statement opposing either the invasion or occupation of Iraq will go home with an empty stomach. That's because it is not an antiwar NGO. It is criticizing the conduct of the war and the actions of the Republican administration on veterans benefits in a way calculated to bewilder people into believing it is an ally of the antiwar movement. So here's my message to Rieckhoff. We got your number. Go home to your imperial buddies. The same goes for Eric Gustafson who heads up the Education for Peace in Iraq Coalition (EPIC), another vet mired in the issue-policy swamp of liberal pluralism. From their own news release in which they piled onto the campaign of lies directed at the Fayetteville action: "Founded in 1998 by human rights advocates, EPIC promotes peace, human rights, and democracy for the people of Iraq. Since the March 2003 invasion of Iraq two years ago this week, EPIC has advocated U.S. and international assistance for Iraqi-led nation-building and opposed the withdrawal of UN-sanctioned forces until Iraq is able to provide for its own security." EPIC's website claims is "was" against the war, but now... here's the uniform mantra among these fronts... WE cannot "abandon" Iraq. The caps are intentional, and the claim is mendacious. Their opposition was not to invading and occupying Iraq, but to the way in which the neocons went about it... that is, without a resolution from the UN Security Council. 'Give me a Security Council resolution, and I'll release my masculine energy on those wogs in a cloudburst of 500-pound bombs!' The other speciality of this "tendency" is to red-bait. So I might as well take that away right here. I'm as red as a baboon's ass and proud of it. I don't have to put on a red hat, though, to talk about this WE business... this WE must not "abandon Iraq." Even my movement allies in the hardly-seditious North Carolina Council of Churches -- who co-sponsored the Fayetteville action -- know that support of ANY continuation of ANY imperial military occupation is NOT antiwar. If you support a military occupation, then you are supporting a war. Two plus two. This is not complicated. Just for the record, Paul & Eric, the US military is not in Iraq to do a damned thing for the Iraqi people. What particular brand of cheap magical-mystery acid does someone take when he implies that Pizarro should be nominated to help the Incas with reconstruction? WE are the barbarians here! This benevolent force you are arguing to leave in Iraq has been used to enforce attacks and sanctions that are slouching toward a body count of 2 million, microtoxified the entire environment with a radioactive condiment that produces babies born without brains, slaughtered children in front of their parents and parents in front of their children, trashed the social and economic infrastructure, imprisoned thousands of people in indiscriminate round-ups (including children, by the way), subjected detainees to sexual humiliation, beatings, rape, murder, and other methods of systematic torture, bombed whole neighborhoods, kicked in the doors of sleeping families and waved guns at their infants and grandmothers, surrounded a city (Fallujah, in case WE forgot), then blocked the exits against "military-aged males," who the US armed forces then exterminated, Warsaw-style, by the thousands. You know, Paul & Eric , that I could go on with this list for some time. That's why the antiwar movement is going to reject your little containment mission for the liberal bourgeoisie (Oh my God, he used another one of those commie words!). It doesn't take a Red to see the White-Man's-Burden stamp across this box of goods you are selling. WE can't abandon the Iraqis, indeed! There is no WE. There is a THEY. I may as well explain this wild-eyed leftist claim. THEY are an imperial ruling class. THEY really do exist, and with about a month's dedicated research, it would be possible for a small staff to list them out with names and addresses... but then someone would accuse us of developing hit lists. Hmmm. THEY operate very like a mafia, and THEY rely very much on their US state to keep things running smoothly, including sending out hirelings to kill their enemies and victims. The difference is that the hirelings, who are vast numbers of working class kids, have been convinced all their lives by a zillion-dollar-a-year Orwellian brainwashing apparatus to believe that killing for bankers and currency speculators and politicians is some noble cause. THEY just sent hundreds of thousands of working class people in uniform to kill hundreds of thousands of unfashionable brown people in order to establish the redisposition of a post-Cold War imperial military into Southwest Asia. THEY have not for one milisecond considered, nor will THEY ever consider, the welfare of Iraqis except when it is politically and militarily expedient. The invasion and occupation of Iraq will not be converted into a Botticelli painting. THEY want to establish permanent military bases there, and every day that they stay there puts them one day closer to that... or more likely to some humiliating denouement like Vietnam, so we can ring up the carcass numbers in five figures with the only body count THEY keep -- American dead. Iraqis don't count, you see. So as long as we're playing the pronoun game, let me point out that YOU and the flabby Democratic Party bosses you ultimately work for when you attack us on actions like Fayetteville... YOU are arguing precisely what your correlatives did during the Vietnam occupation. YOU and all the rest of the civil-societist gasbags in the alphabet soup of issue-policy NGO's are advising moderation in the face of a world that is already deeply in the grip of the very barbarism that Rosa Luxemburg warned us about. (She was red, too.) That's what YOU always do when big sections of the people start to look left. It's your nasty little job, and the latte fumes meandering up from your cups have always masked the smell of spilt blood... because what YOU are endorsing is nothing more nor less than the continuation of Wolfowitz's lethal Caligulan fantasy in Iraq to save capitalism from its own dirty, dangerous, and expensive messes. In Fayetteville, where you would like to have shut us up, Cindy Sheehan tore open the tender wound of her grief for the hundredth time before a crowd, describing the moment when she learned that the child she pushed out of her own body no longer existed, that he had disappeared in a sustained moment of terror and pain during the Sadr rebellion, a rebellion incited gratuitously by the occupation authorities. She puts that grief on display again and again in the hope that others won't have to experience it, when she could stay home and let the wound heal. So I am not going to be diplomatic with Paul Rieckhoff and his ilk, when they misrepresent the action in Fayetteville as somehow being directed against those bewildered, economically caged-in workers in uniform we call "the troops." Of course, class has been off their agenda for a long time. More and more of us already know who is served by trying to check the growing militancy within the antiwar movement, and we recognize the Kiplingesque racism that props up their flaccid argument that the Iraqis are uniquely unqualified to take control of their own destiny. It's not Iraq they are concerned with, after all, is it? They are worried, just like any Democratic Party boss or entrenched union bureaucrat that the left shift in the movement, where a lot of "ordinary" people now seek out and speak with known socialists, will eat into their careerist base. This has always been the motivation for cluster-bomb Democrats. Nothing freaks them out worse than school teachers and postal workers and janitors who are educating themselves on the deeper meaning of words like "imperialism." It's this fear that motivates the cheap attack on the Fayetteville action, because when the resistance is carried into the dark heart of the imperial military itself a storm threat appears on the horizon, and not just for the war but for the bosses at home. The left in this movement is not "against" the soldiers. Speaking for myself, I am on the soldier's side, not as a soldier, but as a human being. I encourage all soldiers to resist. I won't conceal the fact that my encouragement of that resistance is aimed at utterly gutting the capacity of that institution to continue operations in the charnel house they've made of Iraq. Because when the institution of the military can no longer occupy other nations and kill their people, then our sons and daughters will quit returning as torn flesh and pain in mobile burn units, wheelchairs, and body bags. Oh, but WE can not abandon Iraq! Hearing this from Rieckhoff who has never claimed to oppose the war has created the controversy it has partly because many in the antiwar movement, including the alternative media, feted this barn weasel. They thought that his noisy entreaties for better body armor and more Prozac for PTSD were "progressive" for the same reason people voted for that Boston Basset hound, John Kerry. They believe the war is about George W. Bush instead of capitalism. One pampered, intellectually challenged, legacy admission to the White House does not explain the direct line that can be drawn between an airplane flying into a skyscraper and a kid that will kill for a pair of shoes. It doesn't explain the straight line from Abu Ghraib to Pelican Bay. It doesn't explain the connection between Ken Lay and My Lai, between the battering of a wife in Cleveland and the sexual torture of a prisoner in Afghanistan, or between a flood victim in Princeville, North Carolina, and a tsunami victim in Aceh. But there are connections, and they become clearer to people the longer they stay in the antiwar movement, because they want answers. The drivel about staying the course is unsatisfactory. People can see Luxemburg's prediction of barbarism right in front of them. It's here, and this WE finds it unacceptable for future generations. Take your big wooden jackass home and leave us to be on our way. We taking that left turn ahead in the road. And to the soldiers... resist! Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000), "Full Spectrum Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and "Sex & War" which will be released approximately December, 2005. He is retired from the United States Army. His blog is at www.stangoff.com. Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org
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