home / subscribe / donate / tower / books / archives / search / links / feedback / events / faq

Exclusive to CounterPunch Newsletter Subscribers!

Hillary Clinton's Fatal Vices

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair dissect HRC in her White House years and conclude their series on the woman who may be the next president. PLUS Eva Liddell on the man who really set the course of the Bush presidency PLUS Andy Worthington on the battle for the rights of the Guantanamo detainees PLUS Debbie Nathan on what the border crackdown has done to the women crossing the Rio Grande. Get your copy today by subscribing online or calling 1-800-840-3683 Remember contributions to CounterPunch are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now

Order CounterPunch By Email for Only $35 a Year and Receive a Free Copy of
"Imperial Crusades: a Diary of Three Wars" by Cockburn and St. Clair

Now Available!
How the Press Led
the US into War


Buy End Times Now!

Today's Stories

September 11, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
The Fakery of General Petraeus

Iain Boal
Specters of Malthus: Scarcity, Poverty, Apocalypse

Michael Dickinson
Osama on 9/11

Guerry Hoddersen
Free Speech is Not Given, but Taken

Bill Hatch
Irish Politics in Old Time California

Gary Leupp
The Legacy of Luciano Pavarotti

K.G. Godel
Response to Letter to Michael Vick's Dog

Website of the Day
Elisa Salasin's "My September 11th"

September 10, 2007

Uri Avnery
A Big Victory Against the Wall

Patrick Cockburn
Petraeus's Closet

Saul Landau and Farrah Hassen
Screwing Up In Iraq

David Michael Green
Why Fred Thompson is Uniquely Qualified to be the GOP's Nominee

Pius Adesanmi
A Solidarity Letter to a Victim of Michael Vick

Betty Schneider
How to Deal With Sex Offenders

September 8 / 9, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Will the US Really Bomb Iran?

Saul Landau
The Irrational Drama of a Declining Empire

Ismael Hossein-Zadeh
Hurricane Katrina and Bush's Wars

Ray McGovern
Petraeus, the Westmoreland of Iraq

Matthew Abraham
Finkelstein's Legacy at DePaul

Alan Farago
The Governor and the Growth Machine

Christopher Brauchli
Grand Old Party Animals

Rannie Amiri
Battle of the Camps

Fred Gardner
Will Snoops Get Stopped?

James L. Secor
B-52 Flexing Nuclear Muscles: H-Bombs Over Barksdale

Missy Comley Beattie
Choices: Shall We Stay or Shall We Go Now?

Ben Tripp
Still in the Clover

Francis Boyle
The University of Illinois' Little Red Sambo Show

Joe Allen and Paul D'Amato
Jason Bourne vs. James Bond

Website of the Weekend
Drilling Wyoming: the View from Above


September 7, 2007

Robert Fantina
Those Iraq Reports: Bush vs. Reality

John Ross
Coca-Cola's Raid on a Sacred Mountain

James Brooks
The Occupation Within

Russell Mokhiber
Robert Reich and the Elimination of Corporate Criminal Liability

Joshua Frank
The Green Implosion Continues: Cyberlynching John Murphy

John Walsh
On the Green Party

Mark Brenner
New York Taxi Workers Strike Over Tracking Devices

Mike Ferner
"I Will Salute No More Forever"

Website of the Day
Help Save Osny Zachary's Life

 

September 6, 2007

Kathleen and Bill Christison
Bush, Iran and Israel's Hidden Hand

Allan J. Lichtman
When General Petraeus Speaks, Don't Listen ...

Norman Solomon
The Secret Addiction of Thomas Friedman

Yifat Susskind
Hurricane Felix's First Responders: Courage and Tragedy on the Miskito Coast

Catherine Fenton
Why I Am Going to the Protest

Laura Santina
Can the War Machine be Contained?

Farzana Versey
Fission Kashmir

Yves Engler
Haiti: Where a Wage of $2 a Day is Too Much for the Lords of Industry to Pay

Kelly Overton
Bang Bang; Shoot Shoot: Is Hunting Racist?

Michael Simmons
One Jew's Views: The Strange Genius of Drew Friedman and Kominsky Crumb

Website of the Day
Dams and Genocide in Guatemala

 

 

September 5, 2007

Stan Goff
The End Begins

Michael Dickinson
Working for Mother Teresa: Memoirs of a Rebellious Volunteer

Matthew Abraham
Standing Firm with Norman Finkelstein and DePaul's Heroic Students: a Defining Moment

Patrick Cockburn
The Basra Debacle

Dave Lindorff
Beware the Wounded Beast

Paul Craig Roberts
Who Are the Fanatics?

Clifton Ross
Ecuador and the Struggle for Latin American Unity

Elizabeth Schulte
Katrina's Forgotten Refugees

Joseph Grosso
Labor Day in New York City

Ben Terrall
Where's Nancy? On Trying to Protest Pelosi in San Francisco

Website of the Day
A Guide to Narco Dollars

 

September 4, 2007

Jean Bricmont
Why Bush Can Get Away with Attacking Iran

Patrick Cockburn
Cut and Run in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
The Haditha Massacre: Spinning a War Crime

Tom Kerr
Buried Alive on San Quentin's Death Row

Gary Leupp
The Case of Jose Maria Sison

Sonja Karkar
The Weeping Olive Trees of Palestine

Heather Gray
The Best and Worst of America: 9/11, Joseph Lowery and the Lethal Silence of Billy Graham

Fidel Castro
The Super-Revolutionaries

Jackie Corr
Home Depot Comes to Butte--Begging Bowl in Hand

Sunsara Taylor
Katrina and the Progress of the System

Website of the Day
Colombia Journal

 

September 3, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Brits Flee from Basra

Eamon McCann
Qana, Derry: The Dead Lie in Familiar Shapes

Joshua Frank
The End of the Green Party?

Chris Floyd
Post-Mortem America: Bush's Year of Triumph

Marjorie Cohn
A Look at Bush's Iran War Plans

Walter Brasch
The News Drones: How Fake Photos Helped Lead the US to War in Iraq

Matt Reichel
Redefining the American Dream

Website of the Day
Don't Get Fooled Again

 

September 1 / 2, 2007

Alexander Cockburn
Entrapment Snares Larry Craig

Andy Worthington
Britain's Guantánamo

Saul Landau
The Tragic Ordeal of the Cuban Five

David Keen
An Occident Waiting to Happen: Intellectuals and the War on Terror

Patrick Cockburn
The Collapse of Iraq's Health Care Services

Diana Johnstone
Back in Uncle Sam's Pocket

George Longstreth, MD
& Karen Longstreth, RN
The Sorrows of Occupation: Life in the West Bank

Linda M. Woolf
A Sad Day for Psychologists--a Sadder Day for Human Rights

Ralph Nader
Wrapping the World with Advertising

Fred Gardner
The Trial of Mollie Fry, MD

Ben Tripp
Enquiry in America Today

David Michael Green
American Indigestion: Why Bush Governs from the Gut

Missy Comley Beattie
Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: What the GOP Hasn't Learned About Tolerance

Michael Dickinson
Who's Cheating: Remembering Princess Diana

Paul Krassner
Assholes of the Week: From Larry Craig to Wesley Clark

Ron Jacobs
A Sports Nation of Millions

Poets' Basement
Buknatski, Davies and Mickey Z

 

August 31, 2007

Jeff Gibbs
Why I Am Not Going to the Protest

Paul Craig Roberts
The War Criminal in the Living Room

Ray McGovern
Do We Have the Courage to Stop War with Iran?

Robert Weissman
The Benchmarks Iraq is Missing

Matt Vidal
Subprime Lending and Shady Mortgages

Robin Mittenthal
The Biofuels Trap

Chris Kutalik
Auto Makers Push Health Care Trust Solution for Industry in Crisis

Richard Forno
Watching Freedom's Watch

Binoy Kampmark
Dianified

Dave Zirin
Kenneth Foster Lives

Website of the Day
Free the Jena 6

 

August 30, 2007

Gary Leupp
Larry Craig on the Seat

John Ross
Dead Forest Defenders

Anthony DiMaggio
Arabic as a Terrorist Language: the Right-Wing Assault on the Gibran Academy

Jordan Flaherty
Racism and Criminal Justice in New Orleans

Michael Donnelly
The Sierra Club Greenwashes Al Gore (and Desecrates John Muir)

Russell Mokhiber
Whiskey is for Drinking, Water is for Fighting

Dennis Brutus
and Patrick Bond
Global Financial Apartheid

William S. Lind
The Truth Tellers

Martha Rosenberg
They Call Him Dr. Cruel

Jeff Leys / Brian Terrell
Seasons of Discontent: a Presidential Occupation Project

Website of the Day
Bragg: "Old Clash Fan Fight Song"


August 29, 2007

Patrick Cockburn
Maliki and The Mass Shia Pilgrimage to Kerbala

Winslow T. Wheeler
The Costs of the Afghanistan War

David Rosen
The GOP's Outed All-Stars: The Forced Freeing of Gay Men from the Republican Closet

Dave Zirin
Confronting Katrina

Paul Craig Roberts
More Shame, More Sorrow

Diane Farsetta
Christie Todd Whitman's Nuclear Spinning Wheel

Ben Davis
Who Won't Stand Up for Kenneth Foster?: Charles Rangel, For One

Alan Farago
The Housing Crisis and the Environment

Jenna Orkin
Echoes of 9/11: Another Fire at Ground Zero

Don Monkerud
The Vanishing American Vacation

Richard Nasser
Surfing Gaza: More Uplifting News from NPR

Website of the Day
Don't Sleep on the Struggle

 

August 28, 2007

Uri Avnery
The Language of Force

Bill Quigley
Katrina, Two Years Later

Joshua Frank
The Fight to Save the Rocky Mountains

China Hand
"I am Alden Pyle:" Bush's Vietnam Fantasy

Firmin DeBrabander
Drug Wars: From Afghanistan to Baltimore

Charles Peña
Nuclear Fear Factor

Andy Worthington
Good Riddance, Gonzales

Ramzy Baroud
Abbas and the Abyss

Anthony Papa
Roger Stone's New Patsy

Ashley Smith
Drawing the Line at Kennebunkport

Website of the Day
B is for Bomb


August 27, 2007

Jorge Mariscal
The General Reports

Bill Christison
Why the US and Israel Should Lose Middle East Wars

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
911 Emergency! Calling Robert Fisk!: You are Now Entering a Black Hole

Anthony DiMaggio
Chronicle of a Coup Foretold?: Bush, al-Maliki and the Press

Bruce A. Roth
India and the New Nuclear Era

John Walsh
Abe Foxman's Genocide Denial Roadshow, Part 2

Dave Lindorff
Gonzo's Gone

Ron Jacobs
Taking It to the Streets

Binoy Kampmark
Poshed Up: Why the Beckhams Should Go Back to Brighty

Russell D. Hoffman
My Favorite Scientist: John Gofman, Bane of the Nuclear Industry

Website of the Day
George W. Told the Nation

 

 

 


 

 

 

Subscribe Online

September 11, 2007

Free Speech is Not Given, but Taken

By GUERRY HODDERSEN

Freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. —James Baldwin

Five little words on a picket sign — Victory to the Iraqi Resistance — were all it took. Suddenly, rightwing radio zealots, Christian news services and the website of a bayonet-loving militia group went nuts. The Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women in Seattle were committing treason! How to shut us up or, even better, kill us? Topping the list were bombing, shooting, hanging, and the advantages of knives with exotic names like Khukri and Tantos San Mai — with fire ants an also-ran.

A radio jockey who despises affirmative action and women’s rights accused us of hate speech and exhorted his listeners to gather on the doorstep of New Freeway Hall, where the sign was one among many displayed in the window. Within hours, the pro-war fanatics arrived like the good little thought police they wish to become.

Mostly male and all white, they came in their burly SUVs with U.S. flags, a baby tank (I kid you not) and words like faggot and n-gger to hurl at those who did not know how to tow Rumsfeld’s line with the proper decorum.

As it turned out, there were quite a few of us recalcitrant types. Friendly folks came from next door and from, originally, across the planet: from Guatemala and Somalia; from pacifist peace fellowships and revolutionary communist parties; from unions and churches; from high schools and queer groups; from the American Indian Movement and immigrant rights organizations. Brown, Black, yellow, red and white stood together on one side of the street while the red, blue and very white folks stood on the other.
The Allen Combs show, a national FOX radio program, invited me to spend an hour defending us from the accusation that we are in favor of killing U.S. soldiers. To my surprise, three or four out of seven or eight callers expressed some degree of sympathy for the popular uprising in Iraq, despite the fact that U.S. soldiers are dying. A veteran who called from Texas said the U.S. invasion of Iraq, not authorized by Congress, was a "bastard war just like Vietnam and Korea."

The funny thing (if I can use those words) is that several weeks before we became the target of this rightwing hate-o-rama, I had written a letter for the national Freedom Socialist Party (FSP) in solidarity with another group taking fire for their support of the Iraqi resistance.
Three leaders of the Anti-Imperialist Campaign in Italy had been arrested in Perugia as terrorists, along with several members of a Turkish organization. Their crime? Antiwar activities and a "10 euros" campaign to raise money for Iraqi organizations. But since this political work is not a crime in Italy, they were charged with supporting the "terrorist" actions of the pro-Kurdish Revolutionary People’s Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C) of Turkey.

One of the Anti-Imperialist Campaigners arrested was Moreno Pasquinelli. "What is really at stake," he wrote from jail, is "the right of the Iraqi resistance to be defended from Italian soil — which implies not only liberty of expression in this country but also the simple affirmation of the national sovereignty of Italy" (against U.S. imperialism).

In FSP’s statement on behalf of the arrested activists, I wrote: "We too support the victory of the Iraqi people over the forces of imperialism. We call for the end of the U.S. occupation and for full democratic rights, especially for women, in Iraq. We support the strikes and struggles of Iraqi workers. This is not terrorism, but advocacy of the ideals of the right of nations to self-determination, workers’ rights and women’s liberation. Until the recent emergence of the openly expansionist doctrine of the neoconservatives in the Bush regime, these were ideals supported (at least in words) by the majority of Western democracies."

Now, of course, the Bushites want the whole world to just shut up and follow them quietly, even gratefully, into their nightmare where occupation equals liberation, resistance equals terrorism, and smug bastards lie for a handsome salary in government jobs.
Well, I’m not going peacefully. They’ll have to pry that picket sign from my dead cold hands. I was born in the South; I know that had I lived there during the Civil War, it would have been right to speak out against slavery even though Yankee soldiers were killing Confederates. Sometimes you just have to take a stand.

This piece ran in Freedom Socialist • Vol. 25, No. 2 • June-July 2004. In his cover note to CounterPunch Guerry wrote: “Below is a column I wrote about what happened when a small sign advocating solidarity with the Iraqi resistance went up in the window of Seattle Freedom Socialist Party’s headquarters. Reading your July 14 column “Support Their Troops?” in CounterPunch (www.counterpunch.org) prompted me to send it. I agree with you on every point, but it seems to me you left out fear of rightwing backlash as a factor in why the movement doesn’t dare whisper support for the right of Iraqi self-determination. Anyway, thanks for addressing the issue. Sincerely, Guerry.

Guerry Hoddersen can be reached at guerryh@mindspring.com

 

 





Shop at Amazon.com

 

New From
CounterPunch Books

The Secret Language
of the Crossroads:
HOW THE IRISH
INVENTED SLANG
By Daniel Cassidy


Click Here to Buy!

Cassidy on Tour
Click Here for Dates & Venues

"The Case Against Israel"
Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz


Click Here to Buy!


Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal


Click Here to Order!

 

Grand Theft Pentagon
How They Made a Killing on the War on Terrorism

 

 

 

 


The Occupation
by Patrick Cockburn


Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont


 


CITY BEAUTIFUL
By Tennessee Reed

 

 


Bruce Springsteen On Tour
By Dave Marsh

 

The Book on 9/11 the White House Denounced as "ABSOLUTE GARBAGE"