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New Special "Serving Two Flags" Edition of CounterPunch Inside the Neo-Cons: Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith and the Internal Security Problem at the Pentagon by Stephen Green; O'Neill, Oil and Bush by Alexander Cockburn; My Corporation Tis of Thee: The Stryker, The General and the Lobbyist by Jeffrey St. Clair; A Southern Africa Sojourn by Lawrence Reichard; The Kiev Con: Exposing David Duke's Illusory Doctorate; CounterPunch Online is read by 70,000 visitors each day, but 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! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 Cockburn and St. Clair Tour Pacific Northwest!

Now Available from CounterPunch for Only $11.50 (S/H Included) Today's Stories February 20 / 22, 2004 Ghada Karmi Sharon is not the Problem February 19, 2004 Cecilie Surasky Anti-Semitism at the World Social Forum? That's Not What I Saw Ray McGovern Iraq Hawks and Deceptive Intelligence: Did They Really Think They'd Get Away With It? Tariq Ali How Far Will Bush Go in Iraq? Ralph Nader Whither the Nation? Wayne Madsen Would Kerry Purge the Neo-Cons? Norman Solomon The Collapse of Dean's Cyber-Bubble Christopher Brauchli Cheney, Halliburton and the NYT Mike Whitney Bush's Iraq Strategy: "I Hope They Kill Each Other" Lewis Carroll Bush the Mighty Helmsman from Yale Website of the Day Sex Toy Horoscope   February 18, 2004 William Wilgus Bush: AWOL and Dereliction of Duty William Blum Mush-Minded Liberals Dave Lindorff Bush's China Syndrome Greg Weiher Why is Kerry Getting a Pass? Mike Griffin Killing the Messenger: the AFL-CIO's Attack on Harry Kelber Mark Hand Kerry Tells Peace Movement to "Move On"   February 17, 2004 Mike Ferner The Countryside Murders in Iraq Mokhiber / Weissman Corporation as Psychopath Marjorie Cohn DrakeGate: a Victory for Free Speech Kurt Nimmo Bush's Endgame: a Review of Chalmers Johnson's "Sorrows of Empire" Greg Bates Nader Ambush: a New Low for The Nation Ximena Ortiz A Bush Doctrine, of Sorts Gary Leupp Whatever Happened to Gen. Khazraji? Sen. John Kerry "The Cause of Israel is the Cause of America" Steve Perry Kerry 1, Drudge 0 February 16, 2004 James Johnston Huddling with the Cheeseheads in a NASCAR World Sara Eltantawi To Wear the Hijab or Not Bruce Anderson Kevin Cooper and the Midnight Needle Elaine Cassel Feds on Campus: the Drake Subpoenas Rahul Mahajan Bush, Is the Tide Finally Turning? Kevin Cooper The Ritual of Death Stan Cox Goodbye, Howard Dean Larry David My War Steve Perry Bush and the Guard: the Cover-Up's the Thing Website of the Day Prison Patriots: Help This Vital Film Get Made February 14/15, 2004 Alexander Cockburn Milk Bars, Hollywood and the March of Empires Jeffrey St. Clair Oil Grab in the Arctic William A. Cook Faith-Based Fanatics Stan Goff Beloved Haiti Dave Marsh / Lee Ballinger Rock, Rap & the Election Hughes / Weiher Tupac, the Patriot Act and Me Michael Colby Bush v. Kerry: the Power Elite's Dream Ballot Mickey Z. Michael Moore's Lesser Party: the General and the Lieutenant Josh Frank Dean's Demise No Big Loss for the Left Peter Wolson The Politics of Narcissism William James Martin Clean Break with the Road Map Daniel Estulin Religious Extremism in Africa Standard Schaefer The Privatization of Culture: an Interview with Michael Hudson Dave Zirin Maurice Clarett Gets Off the Plantation Tracy McLellan Oprah's Birthday Greedfest Poets' Basement Holt, LaMorticella, Guthrie, Subiet and Albert Website of the Weekend Progressives Scorecard: Where Do the Dems Rank on the Issues That Matter? February 13, 2004 Alan Maass Kevin Cooper's Fight to Live Karyn Strickler McCarthyism in the Sierra Club Annie Higgins On a Street in America Adam Federman Democratic Snipers Target Nader Mike Whitney George W. Faces the Nation Brian Cloughley Our Imperial Leader Has Spoken Website of the Day Lying Action Figure Doll   February 12, 2004 Ray McGovern George Tenet's Spin Cycle Robert Jensen Bush's Nuclear Hypocrisy Saul Landau Elegy to the Salton Sea February 11, 2004 Cockburn / St. Clair Hail, Kerry: Senator Facing-Both-Ways Steve Perry Bush v. Bush?   February 10, 2004 Kurt Nimmo Inquisition in Iowa Ron Jacobs Politics and the Beatles: Don't You Know You Can Count Me Out (In) Elizabeth Schulte The Many Faces of John Kerry Mickey Z Meet the Oxmans: "The Rich Shouldn't Sleep at Night Either"   February 9, 2004 Michael Donnelly Will Skull and Bones Really Change CEOs? Inside John Kerry's Closet Chris Floyd Smells Like Team Spirit: the Bush B-Boys Replay Their Greatest Hits Bill Christison What's Wrong with the CIA? Dr. Susan Block Janet Jackson's Mammary Moment: Boob Tube Super Bowl   February 7/8, 2004 Kathleen Christison Offending Valerie: Dealing with Jewish Self-Absorption Jeff Ballinger No Sweat Shopping Dave Lindorff Spray and Pray in Iraq: a Marine in Transit Alexander Cockburn McNamara: the Sequel February 6, 2004 Ron Jacobs Are the Kurds in the Way? Joanne Mariner Anita Bryant's Legacy Saul Landau Happiness and Botox Kurt Nimmo Horror Non-fiction: A How-To Guide from Perle and Frum Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Real Intelligence Failure: Our Own   February 5, 2004 Benjamin Shepard Turning NYC into a Patriot Act Free Zone Khury Petersen-Smith A Report from Occupied Iraq: "We Don't Want Army USA" Mokhiber / Weissman The 10 Worst Corporations of 2003 Teresa Josette The Exeuctioner's Pslam? Christian Nation? Yeah, Right David Krieger Why Dr. King's Message on Vietnam is Relevant to Iraq Christopher Brauchli Monkey Business: Of Recess and Evolution in Georgia Schools Norman Solomon The Deadly Lies of Reliable Sources Cockburn / St. Clair Presenting President Edwards!   February 4, 2004 Brian McKinlay Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's Last Round Up? Mark Gaffney Ariel Sharon's Favorite Senator: Ron Wyden and Israel Judith Brown Palestine and the Media Frederick B. Hudson Moseley-Braun and the Butcher: Campaign for Justice or Big Oil's Junta? Kurt Nimmo Bush's Independent Commission: Exonerating the Spooks M. Junaid Alam Philly School Workers Fight for Fair Contract Fran Shor Whose Boob Tube? Kevin Cooper This is Not My Execution and I Will Not Claim It     February 3, 2004 Alan Maass The Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability" Nick Halfinger How the Other Half Lives: Embedded in Iraq Rahul Mahajan Our True Intelligence Failure Neve Gordon The Only Democracy in the Middle East? Laura Carlsen Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures Terry Lodge An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts Fairness Campaign Hammond Guthrie Investigating the Meaningless Website of the Day Waging Peace     February 2, 2004 Gary Leupp The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail Justin E.H. Smith The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free Environment Tom Wright The Prosecution of Captain Yee Winslow Wheeler Inside the Bush Defense Budget Lee Ballinger Janet Jackson's Naked Truth Leonard Pitts, Jr For Blacks, the Game of Justice is Rigged Jeffrey St. Clair The Hollow Candidate: The Trouble with Howard Dean Website of the Day Resistance: In the Eye of the American Hegemon   Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004 Paul de Rooij For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities Bernard Chazelle Bush's Desolate Imperium Jack Heyman Bushfires on the Docks Christopher Reed Broken Ballots Michael Donnelly An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear Rob Eshelman The Subtle War Lee Sustar Palestine and the Anti-War Movement George Bisharat Right of Return Ray McGovern Nothing to Preempt Brian Cloughley Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks Conn Hallinan Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs Kurt Nimmo The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons Phillip Cryan Media at the Monterrey Summit Christopher Brauchli A Speech for Those Who Don't Read John Holt War in the Great White North Mickey Z. Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley Mark Scaramella The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key Tariq Ali Farewell, Munif Ben Tripp Waiter! The Reality Check, Please Poets' Basement LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert   January 30, 2004 Saul Landau Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List Michael Donnelly Bush's Second Front: The War in the Woods Elaine Cassel Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo David Vest More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton Mike Whitney The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression David Miller The Hutton Whitewash Sam Husseini How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake", Senator Kerry? January 29, 2004 Patricia Nelson Limerick John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist Ron Jacobs Homeland Security and "Legalized" Immigration Rahul Mahajan New Hampshire v. Iraq Greg Weiher Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on Moon and Mars Norman Solomon The State of the Media Union Cockburn / St. Clair Does NH Mean Anything?   January 28, 2004 Kathy Kelly Bearing Witness Against Teachers of Torture and Assassination                       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 Search CounterPunch

Weekend Edition February 20 / 22, 2004 Greed, Apathy, Dead People An Air That Kills By JOHN HOLT AN AIR THAT KILLS: How the Asbestos Poisoning of Libby, Montana, Uncovered a National Scandal is about small-town Montana and the devastating horrors visited on it by a vermiculite mine owned by those fun-loving corporate bastards at W.R. Grace & Co, and the Zonolite Company before it. The mining of vermiculite, used in products ranging from insulation to potting soil, led to exposure to asbestos that caused and is causing the deaths of hundreds of Libby residents. Grace knew of the dangers, but didn't tell the workers or their families of the deadly dangers associated with living in an environment where more than two and a half tons of asbestos were released into the town's air every day, when One heavy exposure or even one tiny fiber can inaugurate the downward spiral to the grave. A third of the town received what one Libby resident accurately described as "the death sentence," possible lung abnormalities which could indicate early stages of asbestosis (a malignant disease caused by minute but lethal knife-like fibers of asbestos that causing hardening of delicate lung tissue, among other things, and makes breathing impossible in its final stages). Miners who'd worked for Grace or Zonolite were hardest hit. Almost half of these former employees had signs of the disease that would guarantee them a lingering and painful death. The national average for these diseases in a community is 2 percent or less. I'm not known for impartiality. That's not my style. When it comes to writing about An Air That Kills by Andrew Schneider and David McCumber I don't have a chance. McCumber was my editor at Big Sky Journal when the magazine premiered oh so long ago. Before taking the job of managing editor at the Seattle Post Intelligencer he was my neighbor in Livingston, Montana. We're close friends. And one of the main attorneys representing the victims in this horribly revealing book is Jon Heberling, an individual who is not only a long-time friend, but someone I had the privilege of working with when we shut down the Flathead National Forest's lunatic Forest Plan of the late 1980s and early 1990s. He's also the godfather of my daughter, Rachel. And I used to live in Whitefish, Montana just a short drive over the mountains from where this book takes place. I spent many days cruising over to Libby to fish the Kootenai River for rainbow and cutthroat trout, and the rare redband trout in little streams way back up in the timbered mountains that surround the valley. Not once did any of those I came in contact with, individuals that profited by living in the Libby area, mention the problem ­ not the guides and outfitters, not the local Chamber of Commerce, not any of the town's merchants, not a noted writer I spent a little time with who lives in the area. Nobody. And they all knew. How could they not have known when men, and later wives and children, had died and were dying hellish deaths from lung diseases caused by the mine. "Hey, man, talking about death is bad for the local economy. Keep quiet and it will go awa,." Seemed to be the party line all too often.. Fortunately people like Libby residents Gayle Benefield, Les Skramstad and others would not remain silent, would not be shoved out of the dark picture, would not be intimidated. In a book of great sorrow, these are the heroes. Hell, I figured the place was just another northwest Montana community that made its living from mining, logging, and tourism. A place that also had some pretty fair trout fishing in the bargain. I'll always regret not looking a little closer at what was going down in this part of the woods. Fortunately Schneider, McCumber and other members of the PI's staff did look and notice. What they found is awful, made all the more so by the knowledge that what happened to Libby, how Grace does business, is merely standard operating procedure throughout most of corporate America. Just consider some of the following: Millions of us are still threatened by asbestos in out homes, where we work. Most of us believe that using asbestos is now illegal. It isn't. The authors write "Nobody is sure how many homes contain Zonolite. Estimates range from 15 million to 35 million. But according to the EPA and U.S. Justice Department's tally of W.R. Grace invoices the company shipped billions of pounds of tainted ore to more than 750 processing plants throughout North America. Most of those companies produced attic insulation." Many automobile brakes are made with asbestosis. "About six million mechanics have been exposed to asbestos since 1940those exposures are now resulting in 580 asbestos-related excess cancer deaths per year. Within 10 years, the expected rate of mesothelioma deaths alone will be 200 a year from exposure to brake dust." And here's a a big surprise. The Bush White House, through its Office of Management and Budget, blocked the EPA's long-awaited declaration of a public health emergency in Libby in April 2002, and an accompanying warning to millions of citizens that their homes and businesses might contain Grace's deadly asbestos-contaminated insulation. A drastically watered-down memo was finally made public. The authors' also reveal the Bush White House's successful campaign to cover up the asbestos problem in lower Manhattan in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The authors write " Documents from the White House Counsel on Environmental Quality showed a repeated pattern of downplaying the hazard to health even when the sparse information available showed just the opposite ­ to the extent of ordering headlines of government news releases changed completely so no threat or hazard was ever conveyed." One asbestosis-stricken Libby resident said, "Twenty years from now, when those New Yorkers start falling over dead, some young government bureaucrat will get all choked up apologizing for what the EPA and others didn't do." Schneider and McCumber look at the ongoing debate on Capitol Hill over legislation to create a mechanism for resolving asbestos claims outside the judicial system. The authors show how one bill currently under consideration, proposed in 2003 by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, will prevent many current and future victims of asbestos from being eligible for compensation. They point out that jackals that infest the attorney profession are initiating class action litigation that offers victims small compensation while eliminated their rights to sue for future illnesses and wrong doings. Schneider and McCumber aren't just run-of-the-mill journalists. Schneider's won a pair of Pulitzers, a National Headliner Award, a Society of Professional Journalists' public service award, and the George Polk Award. McCumber was a 1984 Pulitzer finalist at the Arizona Daily Star. He edited a Pulitzer-winning project there. He is a past winner of the Don Bolles Award for investigative journalism. His books The Cowboy Way: Seasons of a Montana Ranch; Playing off the Rail; and X-Rated are crystalline, poignant examinations of microcosmic aspects of American life that expand to reveal much greater truths. So when these two talk about the link between the EPA's failure to follow up on its own reports detailing the hazards of Libby's ore, and the Regan Administration's "Private Sector Survey on Cost Control," which was headed by J. Peter Grace, CEO of W.R. Grace & Co., and in an interview with William Ruckelshaus, who served as the EPA's first administrator in 1970, and again during the Reagan years, the authors quote Ruckelshaus as saying " If Grace's company owned that mine in Libby or had any other major involvement with asbestos, (Peter Grace) shouldn't have been reviewing actions dealing with the regulation of the asbestos industry" ­ when Schneider and McCumber discuss these issues, I listen. And when the two write about W.R. Grace's cynical strategy to reassign employees whose X-rays showed significant signs of disease to less dirty jobs so as to minimize their exposure to asbestos dust in order to keep them on the job until they retired, and preclude the high cost of total liability; or when they expose the company touting its "Libby Medical Program" for anyone in the town diagnosed with asbestosis, even as the program repeatedly denies coverage to applicants and refuses to pay for some of their medications and oxygen, when Schneider and McCumber write about these things and many other indecencies, I believe them. If An Air That Kills just served the purpose of exposing W.R. Grace's criminal and barbaric treatment of the Libby mine workers and their families, the book would have covered its purchase cost going away. It would be an important title. As it is, this significant work serves as an example of how not only hundreds of companies in this country view doing business, but how corporate entities around the world callously make a buck. An Air That Kills is required reading for anyone who cares. John Holt has been called the Hunter Thompson of Montana. He is the author of numerous books, including the gripping novel Hunted, and Coyote Nowhere: In Search of America's Lost Frontier. He lives in Livingston, Montana and can be reached at: jholt@msn.net Weekend Edition Features for February 14 / 15, 2004 Alexander Cockburn Milk Bars, Hollywood and the March of Empires Jeffrey St. Clair Oil Grab in the Arctic William A. Cook Faith-Based Fanatics Stan Goff Beloved Haiti Dave Marsh / Lee Ballinger Rock, Rap & the Election Hughes / Weiher Tupac, the Patriot Act and Me Michael Colby Bush v. Kerry: the Power Elite's Dream Ballot Mickey Z. Michael Moore's Lesser Party: the General and the Lieutenant Josh Frank Dean's Demise No Big Loss for the Left Peter Wolson The Politics of Narcissism William James Martin Clean Break with the Road Map Daniel Estulin Religious Extremism in Africa Standard Schaefer The Privatization of Culture: an Interview with Michael Hudson Dave Zirin Maurice Clarett Gets Off the Plantation Tracy McLellan Oprah's Birthday Greedfest Poets' Basement Holt, LaMorticella, Guthrie, Subiet and Albert Website of the Weekend Progressives Scorecard: Where Do the Dems Rank on the Issues That Matter? Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /