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The Return of Robert Rubin: Kerry, Jobs and the Economy by Alexander Cockburn; Party Favors: the Political Business of Terry McAuliffe by Jeffrey St. Clair; The Kill Zone: Caring for the Wounded in Fallujah by David Martinez. In April, CounterPunch Online was read by 16.1 million viewers--by far our biggest month ever. 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 (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Today's Stories

May 10, 2004

Diane Christian
Images & Abstractions & Genitals

May 8 / 9, 2004

Cockburn / St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie

Adam Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated and Shot at Kunduz?

Douglas Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press

Kurt Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib

Brian Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling

Lucia Dailey
Forbidden Games

Joanne Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui

Mickey Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)

John Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain

Doug Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs

Norm Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11

Sam Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah

Susan Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art

Dave Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing

Laura Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne

Dave Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base

Carolyn Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004

Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"

Dr. Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation

Poets' Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska

 

May 7, 2004

Human Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention Facilities in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So

Robert Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War

Ahmad Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien Phu

Alexander Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison) Bell?

Mike Whitney
The Price of Victory

Norman Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial

M. Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology

 

May 6, 2004

Jeffrey St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with Shit; Kicked to Death

Kathy Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor for the War Machine

Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas Casino Game

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy

Robert Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded Men Being Shot by US Helicopter

John Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?

Christopher Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!

Alan Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish

Sam Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning

James Brooks
Sullen Spring

William S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq

May 5, 2004

Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of Iraqi Prisoners

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?

Will Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian Zionist and the End of the World

Patrick B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label

Lawrence Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue

Greg Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing Truth

Lee Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity

Gilbert Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire

Website of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq

 

May 4, 2004

Human Rights Watch
A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations and Responses

Kurt Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture

David Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq

Barry Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers

Patrick Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised

Dr. Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say

Fidel Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War

Mike Whitney
Empire of Torture

Sonali Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against John Kerry

Josh Frank
The Lost Sierra Club

Stan Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq

Agustin Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics

Stew Albert
American Know-How

Website of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up

 

 

May 3, 2004

Virginia Tilley
Let the Wall of Silence Fall

May 1 / 2, 2004

Patrick Cockburn
An Army in Disgrace, a Policy in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat

Robert Fisk
"Good Guys" Who Can Do No Wrong

Alexander Cockburn
Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders, Useless Spies, Angry World

Heather Williams
Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin American Troops Flee Iraq

Diane Rejman
An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq: Abu Ghraib as My Lai?

Diane Christian
Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and Sharon Speak the Same Language

Patrick Cockburn
Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked, Shocked, Shocked

Chris Floyd
Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists and Annihilation

April 29 / 30, 2004

Dave Zirin
A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome Death of Pat Tillman

Kathy Kelly
The Warden's Tour

Greg Weiher
Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the Banality of Evil

Michael S. Ladah
Terrorism and Assassination: the Ultimate Depception

Patrick Cockburn
The Fallujah Mutinies

 

 

April 28, 2004

Christopher Brauchli
Meet Congressman Know-Nothing: Tom Tancredo

Wendy Brinker
The Politics of the Numb

Faisal Kutty
The Dirty Work of Canadian Intelligence

John Chuckman
Seeking the Evil One

Mike Whitney
Flag-Draped Coffins and the Seattle Times

Tom Mountain
Rwanda and the F***** Word

Graeme Greenback
The Iraqi Alamo: a CNN/CIA Production

Tracy McLellan
The War Comes Home

M. Junaid Alam
We are the Barbarians

William Loren Katz
Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson

 


April 27, 2004

James Davis
The Colombia 3 Acquitted

Dave Lindorff
Chalabi as Prosecutor

Bruce Schneier
Terrorist Threats and Political Gain

Cockburn / Sengupta
British Generals Resist Calls for More Troops to Aid Americans in Iraq

Walt Brasch
Presidential Letters: The Day I Was Asked to Feed an Elephant

Saul Landau
The Empire in Denial and the Denial of Empire


April 26, 2004

Patrick Cockburn
Crossing the Shia Line: US Troops Prepare to Enter Najaf

Wayne Madsen
Trading Places: Will the US Go the Way of the USSR?

Grover Furr
Protest, Rebellion, Commitment

Elaine Cassel
Lies About the Patriot Act

Mickey Z.
Inspired by Pat Tillman?

Greg Moses
Bremer's De-De-Ba'athjfication Gambit

Gila Svirsky
Anarchy in Our Souls

Uri Avnery
Vanunu and the Terrible Secret


April 24 / 25, 2004

William A. Cook
Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry and Bush Melt into One

Jeffrey St. Clair
Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank

Brandy Baker
A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So

Robert Fisk
A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free Speech

Ben Tripp
October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios

Nelson Valdés
"Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg

Lucson Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Return to the Future

Kurt Nimmo
The CIA Killed Pat Tillman

Mark Scaramella
Does Anybody Know Anything?

Patrick Cockburn
The Return of Saddam's Generals

Gary Engler
Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas

Col. Dan Smith
Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush

Greg Weiher
Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam...

Elaine Cassel
Life on the Outside: a Review

Vanessa Jones
Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney

Jim French
Agriculture's Bullied Market

Hammond Guthrie
Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles

Poets' Basement
Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella


April 23, 2004

Ron Jacobs
The Only Solution is Immediate Withdrawal

Dave Lindorff
Imagination Deficit Disorder

Mokhiber / Weissman
Contractors and Mercenaries: the Rising Corporate Military Monster

Norman Solomon
Country Joe Band, 2004: "What Are We Fighting For?"

Cynthia McKinney
All Things Are Not Equal: the Perils of Globalization

CounterPunch Wire
A Bitch Called Wanda

Karyn Strickler
Sierra Club, Inc.

Hammond Guthrie
Yellow Caked in the Face

Paul de Rooij
Graveyard of Justifications: Glossary of the Iraqi Occupation

 


April 22, 2004

Patrick Cockburn
When Terror Came to Basra: "I Saw a Minibus of Children on Fire"

Tanya Reinhart
The Wall Behind Disengagement

Lance Selfa
Why is Kucinich Still in the Race?

Josh Frank
Street Fighting Man? Kucinich's Pulled Punches

Sen. Robert Byrd
Bush Owes America Answers on Iraq

William S. Lind
Why We Get It Wrong

Mickey Z.
Undoing the Latches

Robert Jensen
Why They Fast: Remembering the Victims of the World Bank

John L. Hess
The New York Times from 30,000 Feet

 

April 21, 2004

Gary Leupp
Yeats on Iraq

Alfredo Castro
Colombia's Forgotten Prisoners

Dr. Susan Block
Bush's Taliban Drug Deal

William A. Cook
George 1 to George 2

Jack Random
Iraq and Vietnam

Jean-Guy Allard
Alarcon Meets the Editors

Mike Whitney
Charade in the Desert

Bill Christison
Only Major Policies Changes Can Help Washington Now

 

 


April 20, 2004

Dave Lindorff
Bush and Kerry Share a Problem

Stan Cox
Wal-Mart's Magic Numbers

Bruce Anderson
On Listening to Air America

Joseph Kalvoda
Czech Mate for Condi

Greg Moses
Yesterday's Intelligence

Stan Goff
The Democrats and Iraq

Website of the Day
Santorum Happens

 

 


April 19, 2004

Kurt Nimmo
The "Central Hand" of the Resistance

Mike Whitney
Bob Woodward's Imperial Trifles

Douglas Valentine
52 Pick-Up and the 100-to-1 Rule

John Chuckman
The Sharon Annex: Evil Does Often Triumph

Doug Giebel
Welcome to the Club

Rahul Mahajan
Hospital Closings and War Crimes

 

 

April 16 / 18, 2004

Robert Fisk
Bush Legitimizes Terror

Saul Landau
Subverting Brazil and Cuba

Dave Lindorff
Paying for War: $2,150 per Family and Counting

Brandy Baker
Fallujah's Collateral Damage

Mickey Z.
The Left Attacks from the Right

Bruce Jackson
The Bush Press Conference: Gott Mit Uns

Norman Solomon
How the "NewsHour" Changed History

Alexander Cockburn
Bush, Kerry and Empire

 

April 15, 2004

Greg Moses
Follow the Families, Not the Script

Virginia Tilley
The Carnage According to Gen. Kimmitt: Just Change the Channel

Ron Jacobs
They Coulda Been Champions of the World: Hurricane Carter and Ron Kovic

Michael Neumann
A Happy Compromise: Hate Crimes Reporting in the Toronto Globe and Mail

 

April 14, 2004

Tom Reeves
Return to Haiti: an American Learning Zone

Reza Fiyouzat
Japan and Iraq

Ron Jacobs
What Bush Really Said

Diane Christian
The Real Passion


 

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
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The Erosion of the American Dream

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May 10, 2004

Why They Hate Us

Racism, Bigotry and Abuse

By RAY HANANIA

Americans hate to be told that their culture is often based by the hatred of other people, particularly foreigners. But racism and bigotry are a fact of American life, which is built on the decades of civil rights abuses of African Americans and other minorities.

The only thing different today, is that the targets of most American hatred are Arabs and Muslims.

That's why I am not surprised by the Iraqi prison abuse scandal, where Americans who supposedly went to "liberate" Iraq, filled the very same prisons used by the toppled Saddam Hussein to torture Iraqis to do the exact same thing.

There seems to be no limit to the disclosures about American misconduct and war crimes in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Incidents range from depraved humiliation and torture to sexual assault, rape and worse, murder.

Worse, the fact the pictures were taken of these criminal acts suggest that the perpetrators were doing something they never suspected they would be punished for, and that maybe even they might be celebrated for when they returned to this country.

Grotesque souvenirs of their pride that when you see the gleeful laughter and smiles on the faces of the war criminal soldiers involved, they clearly planned to share and enjoy with others when they returned home from the "liberation."

Americans have a tradition of putting an ethnic face to terrorism and violence, but only when the perpetrators don't fit the majority mold and are non-White.

Tim McVeigh was a terrorist with a religious and political agenda, but no one said he represented a certain ethnic group. David Koresh was another fanatic, as was Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

The white male profile leads the list of serial killers, rapists and pedophiles, but no one puts a White ethnic face to those crimes. It's only when you are Black, Hispanic or "foreign" that your ethnicity suddenly becomes a key criteria.

So when the horror and terrorism of September 11th brought the Middle East conflict to American shores, patriotism took on a new meaning, one driven by the certainty that the only real violent threat to America is the threat from Arabs and Muslims.

That message was drilled home every day. Arabs and Muslims were demonized, vilified and denounced by hosts on radio, cable news television and by politicians.

Islam is denounced by "respected" religious leaders as "evil." Cries for Arabs and Muslims to be arrested, deported or worse were repeated by everyone from local to national political and government leaders.

Protesters savaged Arab neighborhoods and vandalized anything that even distantly smacked of being "Middle Eastern," and thousands of Americans who looked or were Middle Eastern were harassed, assaulted and in the cases of at least 14 people, murdered.

If prosecutions are to be sought, the defendants shouldn't just be prison guards, but TV and radio talkshow hosts, the American news media and some of our most respected members of the U.S. Congress.

They made this possible. The prisoners were the guns but the media and many American leaders pulled the triggers.

Why should we be surprised that soldiers who endured this hateful environment -- a real-life version of the classic Hollywood movie, Lord of the Flies.

But the perpetrators in the Iraq prison abuse scandal are not little children abandoned on a remote island far away from civilization and too young to understand concepts of civility, humanity, human dignity and morality.

They are adults nurtured in a growing American environment where your patriotism is defined by how loudly you scream for revenge or curse Arabs, Muslims and anyone else who has olive colored skin and a differing political viewpoint.

The demonization continues despite the findings, with defenders of the atrocities asserting that "they did worse things to us," and "remember September 11th!" Despite all our claims about America built on honor, respect and "a higher standard," the fact is Americans are no different than the enemies they chase.

In a way, Americans may even be worse.

Ray Hanania is former national president of the Palestinian American Congress, an award-winning nationally syndicated columnist. He can be reached at www.hanania.com.




Weekend Edition Features for May 8 / 9, 2004

Cockburn / St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie

Adam Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated and Shot at Kunduz?

Douglas Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press

Kurt Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib

Brian Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling

Lucia Dailey
Forbidden Games

Joanne Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui

Mickey Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)

John Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain

Doug Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs

Norm Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11

Sam Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah

Susan Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art

Dave Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing

Laura Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne

Dave Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base

Carolyn Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004

Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"

Dr. Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation

Poets' Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska

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