Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
Now Available!
Today's
Stories
May
15 / 16, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Green Lights for Torture
May
14, 2004
Dr.
Susan Block
Bush's POW Porn
Ron
Jacobs
Secret History of the War on Drugs
William
Blum
God, Country and Torture
Michael
Donnelly
The People v. Corporate Greed: A Victory on the North Coast
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
India Shines
Stephen
Gowans
Building Democracy in Iraq and Other
Absurdities
May
13, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Where is Kerry?
Colm
O'Laithian
Torture and Degradation: Revenge American Style?
Saul
Landau and Farrah Hassan
Wal-Mart: Scrooge with Hi-Tech Accounting
Practices
Ralph
Nader
An Open Letter to Bush on the Inhumane Treatment of Iraqi Prisoners
Willliam
James Martin
Deir Yassin Massacre Recalled
Marc
Salomon
Reality TV Bites
Forrest
Hylton
Law 'n Order in La Paz: All Quiet
on the Southern Front?
May
12, 2004
Blanton
/ Kornbluh
Prisoner Abuse: Cheney Warned in
1992
Virginia
Tilley
So, Who's to Blame?
Bruce
Jackson
James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator
of Them All
Thomas
P. Healy
No Enemies: Making Peace with Bert Sacks
Linda
S. Heard
Racism and Ignorance: a Lethal Cocktail in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
Spinning Torturegate
Lisa
Viscidi
The People's Voice: Community Radio in Guatemala
Jack
Heyman
View from the Bay Bridge: Longshoremen Plan Mass Workers March
on DC
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Rummy's Reprieve
CounterPunch
Wire
Teamsters Corruption Scandal: Hoffa Exec. Assistant Alleged to
Have Quashed Investigation into Mob Influence
Christopher
Brauchli
Detention Camp, USA
William
S. Lind
Bush's Waterloo?
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
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.
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Weekend
Edition
May 15 / 16, 2004
The Obsession
with Possession
Fencing the
Sky
By JOHN HOLT
I suspect that men are going
along this way for the last time, and I for one don't want to
waste the trip
Robert Traver--Anatomy of
a Fisherman
My difficulties with fences began
some years ago, a delicate transmutation arising from problems
I had and still have with gates. Either my hands get scratched
from trying to latch the ragged compilations of weathered tree
limbs and barbed wire that block passage to some exotic fishing
water or I pinch my fingers in the workings of the newer hook-type
mechanism or I become inextricably tangled in the wire while
crossing through. And with the certainty of an eastern-horizon
sunrise, I find myself on the wrong sides of these gates after
closing them. Coming or going, it doesn't matter. The Suburban
is always beyond the gate waiting for me to figure things out.
When I turned fifty crossing
fences turned into a struggle. I'm in fairly good shape, not
too much overweight, and manage to totter around with a modest
degree of authority, but now I cannot get over, under or through
a fence, particularly barbed wire ones, without some sort of
mishap. All of the shirts I wear fishing or bird hunting are
torn along the shoulders and back. My sweaters have loops pulled
from their tight knitting large enough to hold ice axes, and
my waders leak, doing little more now than visually announce
that I'm about to chase some fish.
One time along the Shields
River I became entangled while stooping and grunting through
some wire that silently guarded a delightful stretch of prime
water. Frustrated - I could hear trout splashing after caddis
less than 30 feet away- I jerked free only to have the tip guide
of my fly rod hook on a rusty barb. Jerking the rod sharply I
lost my footing, the rod separating at mid section. I slid to
the bottom of the embankment with line humming off the reel as
though I'd hooked a five-pound brown. Nothing serious came of
this calamity. I lost a few minutes of my life during regrouping.
The tip guide was bent into a narrow oval and my torn shirt was
now more torn. I was dusty and bedraggled, but that's how I wind
up looking after fishing anyway. I went on to have a pleasant
day catching a few browns, but that incident was the beginning
of my firm dislike for fences and an beginning of an awareness
concerning our obsession with closing land in, delineating, and
not so tacitly stating that, a given piece of property that is
owned is now longer a part of what's left of free range in the
West.
We're all obsessed with possession.
Relationships between the sexes are often defined by the scars
of these emotional turf wars. That's to be expected. We're a
flawed species. And purchasing a piece of land is overt possession,
but controlling this land is absurd. Yeah, I understand that
if someone pays the bucks they can do what they want with the
acreage. Cattle must be managed. And riffraff such as myself
needs to be kept at bay. A dwindling few ranchers still allow
access to their land if a person politely asks and remembers
to thank them with a Christmas bottle of rye whiskey or such.
But the whole ownership thing is out of control on the high plains.
Orange spray-painted fence posts by the millions, "Keep
Out" signs swaying in the wind and "No hunting or fishing.
No trespassing" warnings. How a person can do the former
two without committing the latter is a mystery. This variation
seems a case of restating the obvious. If you can't pass, you
logically can't fish or hunt.
And I love the entrances to
many of the newer ranches or ranchettes, the ones marked by a
pair of enormous Ponderosa pine trunks topped by an equally large
trunk across the top. And dangling below the top brace in clear
examples of human hauteur are signs that dance to the tune of
"Smith's Ponderosa" or "Jones's Wild West Retreat"
or, my personal favorite, "Wall Street Retreat." Thankfully
the plains Indians never adopted this insecure form of territorialism.
Visions of "Plenty Coups' Palace" or "Dull Knife's
Estancia" come shakily to mind.
All of this makes sense to
me. Let's all hem in the land and its spirit with miles of barbed
wire and then announce to the world who exactly is responsible
for this self-absorbed mayhem. Like we own the good country in
the long term. Recent wildfires in Montana and now California
say otherwise, as do drought, earthquake and the inevitable ice
age. I've never been a wannabe Indian. Not my style, and quite
sensibly on the tribes' part, they don't want me, but whatever
happened to respecting the land that can never be truly owned?
What about honoring and submitting to the long-running buzz that
is the electric spirit of the West?
Sure fencing one's property
ensures at least the illusion of privacy and security. We can
all drive down our private, dusty lanes, sit on the front porch
and arrogantly say while sipping some expensive single malt,
"I've got mine. You can't have it. I'm really living now."
The mentality that made us great hideously guts the essence of
open space.
Up until a few years ago I
couldn't imagine what Montana or the Dakotas would have been
like 150 years ago. A land of no fences, few people and a vastness
filled with wild animals that rivaled Africa's now ravaged Serengeti.
For the past several years I've been drifting up to the far north
of the Yukon and Northwest Territories with increasing frequency
while researching a book. When I first drove through the hundreds
of miles of uncut boreal forest and crossed rivers like the Mackenzie
that are more than a mile wide and 40 feet deep, when I saw thousands
of woodland bison grazing by the dirt roads that are called highways
up there, I was blown away. To finally experience such an immense
wealth of wilderness, an area many times the size of Montana,
with so few signs of people was staggering. To catch countless
grayling of several pounds from one small stretch of river was
stunning. One day last June as I cruised up to the First Nations
Dene De Cho settlement of Pedzah Ki, I watched the Mackenzie
flow, not flow but power, its way north to above the Arctic Circle
and finally into the Beaufort Sea. The Canyon Range, then the
Mackenzie Range, then other mountains rolled away to the west
for hundreds of miles. Moose ghosted through stands of dwarf
birch. Black bears were all over the place feeding on the green,
rich grasses of a short, intense summer. Through binoculars I
sighted grizzlies wandering the slopes of the McConnell Range.
Fifty miles to the south, Nahanni Butte shimmered silvery blue.
For days I saw only a few settlements of maybe 100 people each.
No phone or electric lines. No fences. The difference in the
energy, in the feel, of this land was palpable. The countryside
sizzled and seemed to flicker with a light that is not seen by
the eyes. This must have been what the Big Sky felt like a couple
of centuries past. Montana is home in my heart, but the North
in its, for now, untamed radiance owns my soul.
Experiencing all of this up
north made me see that we don't improve things for ourselves
or, more importantly, for the good country when we attempt to
stamp our designs of control on the landscape. Instead we cut
out the heart of the place and in the process slice away chunks
of ourselves. In a few years my children will be off to college
and I'm going to move out of Livingston and back into the empty,
open spaces. I'd like to believe that I'll tear down all of the
fences on whatever place I find, but knowing myself, I doubt
it. I want my piece of paradise just like anyone else.
Last October while returning
from another day fishing on the Shields I crossed several fences
on the way back to the Suburban. Angus cattle were casually grazing
on the last of the year's good grass. As is normal these days,
I fought with a fence near the highway. When I finally passed
through I looked up and saw a lone cow standing on the road-side
of the fence. Cattle do this. They always want what they see
on the other side, then decide that they really need to return
to their original side of the obstruction. The animal was pushing
against the barbed wire trying to rejoin its herd. The cow bawled
in its frustration. A large gash ran along its flank. Blood from
the wound glistened in the sunlight. I turned away, unlocked
the back doors of the rig and started to put away my gear. I
looked down at my right hand. A long scratch ran from the base
of the little finger to the wrist. There was a good deal of blood
that, too, glistened in the light.
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 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
|