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New Edition of CounterPunch 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! Now Available: Hot New CounterPunch T-Shirts! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Cockburn / St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War Now Available! Today's Stories May 12, 2004 Bruce Jackson James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator of Them All Christopher Brauchli Detention Camp, USA May 11, 2004 Mark Engler On the "Necessity" of Torture Ray McGovern More Troops? A March of Folly Kurt Nimmo Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment Mickey Z. Less Than Hero Christopher Reed Torture on the Homefront: America's Long History of Prison Abuse Dennis Hans When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar Bruce Jackson Pete Seeger at 85 Mike Whitney Killing al Sadr Simon Helweg-Larsen Shrinking the Guatemalan Military William A. Cook The Unconscious Country: Righteous Indignation, Nakedly Displayed May 10, 2004 Robert Fisk From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib: Racism and Torture as Entertainment Wayne Madsen The Israeli Torture Template: Rape, Feces and Urine-Soaked Cloth Sacks Col. Dan Smith The Shame of Abu Ghraib Joe Bageant John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife! Ron Jacobs Rummy's Prisongate Blues: Don't Leave Mad; Just Leave Ben Tripp Getting in Touch with Your Inner Savage Ray Hanania Why They Hate Us: Racism, Bigotry and Abuse Reza Fiyouzat "Mishandled" Invasions Diane Christian Images & Abstractions & Genitals Website of the Day Crushing Iraqi Skulls with Tanks for Sport?   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 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

May 12, 2004 No Enemies Making Peace with Bert Sacks By THOMAS P. HEALY Bloomington, Indiana will host the 5th Annual National Grassroots Organizing Conference on Iraq on Memorial Day weekend, May 28-31, in Ballantine Hall at Indiana University. This year's theme is "From Humanitarian Disaster to Quagmire: The Failure of the 'War on Terror.'" Speakers will include Bert Sacks, whose humanitarian efforts in Iraq have put him at odds with the U.S. government. Sacks, a retired software engineer in Seattle, read a New York Times story in March 1991 that quoted a United Nations report on the situation in Iraq. "It used the phrase, 'Iraq's been bombed to near-apocalyptic state,'" Sacks said in a recent conversation. "The last paragraph says, "There will be famine and epidemic in Iraq unless massive life-supporting aid is given. Time is short." Although previously uninvolved in political protests, Sacks decided to act. Collaborating with organizations such as Voices in the Wilderness and Physicians for Social Responsibility, he led eight trips to Iraq. A 1997 trip during which he delivered more than $40,000 worth of medicine ran him afoul of Executive Order 12,724, which prohibits U.S. citizens from traveling to Iraq. Upon his return to the U.S., the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) notified Sacks that his conduct was illegal and fined him $10,000. On principle, he refused to pay. "By what authority does the government say it has the right to tell me I cannot bring those people medicines?" he asks. He says the aspirins, cough medicine and antibiotics he delivered "have no nefarious use at all." "In 1997, we took over $40,000 worth of donated medicines to people we knew would use them for the civilian population [of Iraq]," he said, adding, "All of that is a protected right under the Geneva convention." The U.S. government has other ideas. Sacks' attorneys filed a Motion to Dismiss earlier this year. Government attorneys responded, "[T]he Geneva convention is only effective if Congress implements it through domestic legislation, which it has not." In other words, pay up. Sacks has a problem with that. "According to the New York Times, in March 1991 - 3 weeks after the end of the [first Gulf] war - the U.S. position was, 'By making life uncomfortable for the Iraqi people we will soon encourage them to remove Saddam Hussein from power.' "The New York Times doesn't say those things out of the blue. It's pretty clear that in '91 our strategy was, 'We're not going to send American troops into Baghdad to die to overthrow this guy. It'll shatter the coalition and American troops will die. Instead we're going to use famine and epidemic against the Iraqi people, making sure they have no safe water, no electricity, no sewage for 5 or 6 million people in Baghdad. Their life is going to be hell.'" Sacks thinks the strategy has backfired. "After causing 12 years of devastation through the sanctions, we're beginning to see that they're not going to welcome us as liberators," Sacks notes. "There's a lot of resentment and anger because of what we did to them." By getting a firsthand look at a country ruined both by U.N. sanctions and by U.S. military actions, Sacks has seen a side of reality domestic media don't report. "In 1999, UNICEF reported that there were 500,000 children under age 5 in Iraq who would be alive if the improving infant mortality had continued from 1990. I don't know how to emphasize enough the meaning of that - half a million children in a country of 20 million. Then you look at how that was covered here and I could find only two newspapers in the entire country that quoted that statistic. The Wall Street Journal covered that entire story in two sentences. There was no mention of the statistic and the second sentence says whatever happens is Saddam's fault anyhow." "It's my belief," Sacks says, "and our presidents have said, that the people of Iraq are not our enemy, they are our brothers and sisters." Besides relying on international law and basic human compassion, Sacks points to U.S. history as justification for his work. "At one point the law in this country was that an escaped slave was the property of his owner. So if a runaway slave showed up at your door it was your legal obligation to return him to slavery," he says. "That begs the question, 'Who do we respect, the people that abided by the law or the people that helped the Underground Railroad?'" For Sacks such historical facts make it clear "that everybody in a free country has an obligation to weigh the rightness of a law before deciding to obey or disobey." The practice of compassionate listening now informs his activism. "The way we are taught is that when we sit with somebody we disagree with we are just waiting for them to finish and tell them how wrong they are," he says. "Well, what usually happens is you wind up in an argument. How often do you succeed in convincing anybody when you come at them from that attitude?" He describes compassionate listening as a call for a much deeper way of relating to other people. "What you really want to try to do is to sit and quiet your mind and hold all of your arguments aside. You don't forget them. But what you try to do is listen to the human being who's sitting across from you and ask yourself, 'How can I empathize? How can I understand this person for the suffering human being that he is?" Sacks has since joined the Compassionate Listening Project, which seeks to establish connections with different factions in the Israeli/Palestinian dialogue, including Jewish settlers in the West Bank and members of Hamas. He feels that compassionate listening skills are important for the peace movement to learn. "It's crucial that we don't demonize," he says. "Demonizing distorts your view and populates your universe with evil people." He adds, "If you listen to the rhetoric coming out of the White House since 1990 to prepare us to go to war, there is this view of evil people, and we're the good people and we're fighting evil." Sacks says the questions "How can I understand the humans who are doing these things?" and "How can I understand how somebody becomes a terrorist or a suicide bomber?" are never asked, so we've never been able to understand the situation. "If we understand, then we'll be in a position to be able to ask, "How can we stop this?" he says. He maintains that in order to be effective, the peace movement doesn't need to demonize George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, or anybody else. "What we need to do is to present the evidence, the information to oppose their policy but not to hate them, not to cultivate anger toward them but to see them as dangerous and confused, struggling humans, which I think they are." The task of the peace movement is to educate a large section of the population, Sacks says. "Many are so un- and misinformed, and out of their ignorance are inclined to side with the commander in chief because they think that's the American thing to do." To counter the misinformation, Sacks and fellow Seattle-area peacemakers have created the Citizens Committee for Responsible Journalism. "The media are failing us," Sacks says. "The media failed to ask critical questions about weapons of mass destruction, simply repeating what the government said without much investigation or without much critical questioning." He hopes to mobilize thousands of readers in Seattle to contact local print and broadcast media and say, "This is not acceptable to us. You are failing in your function in a democracy." He's had modest success with at least one Seattle paper. The Post-Intelligencer sent a reporter along with Sacks on three of his trips. "They did a great eight-page special report in 1999 and won an award," he says. "We had 15,000 reprints made and sent it to everybody in Congress." He's focused on local media because groups like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and MoveOn are working on a national level. "I think we have the best impact if we can make a model that will work locally," he says. "If this whole committee corresponds with the media, not just me, we'll get what we want." Thomas P. Healy is a journalist in Indianapolis. For details on the conference: www.endthewar.org, 888-END-A-WAR; endthewar@endthewar.org 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 WWW http://www.counterpunch.org   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /