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Today's
Stories
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
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
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
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
January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
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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February
4, 2004
Moseley-Braun and
the Butcher
Campaign
for Justice or Big Oil's Junta?
By FREDERICK B. HUDSON
On January 15, 2004, former U.S. Senator Carol
Mosely Braun announced her withdrawal from the 2004 Presidential
campaign. She was embraced by fellow candidate Howard Dean as
a new member of his campaign team who would take his message
to the people. When asked if she had advice for the next African-American
woman who dared to run for Chief of State, she quipped, "I
would tell her to get comfortable shoes."
Good advice, maybe. But perhaps the former
Ambassador needs lessons in how to walk in the shoes of the downtrodden
of Nigeria.
Ms. Braun was severely criticized by
Nigerian exiles living in the United States in 1996 when Democratic
party officials let her address the Chicago convention right
after she returned from a junket' in Nigeria where she hobnobbed
with one of Africa's most brutal dictators, Gen. Sani Abacha.
On her $7,000, four-day August jaunt,
Moseley-Braun met with the junta leader who jailed Nigeria's
elected president, arrested around 7,000 political opponents,
and hanged playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa along with nine other environmental
activists.
While in Nigeria, she met no pro-democracy
opposition leaders. She appears never to have raised the issues
of massive human-rights abuses with Abacha. Instead, she traveled
around Saro-Wiwa's home province of Ogoniland with the military,
and according to Nigerian press reports chatted up the military
governor who supervised the hangings.
She ignored State Department protocol,
never telling them she was going, and undercut a White House
mission by Rep. Bill Richardson, D-N.M., who had been sent to
press Abacha to discuss human rights. By contrast, Nigerian state
media reported that Sen. Moseley-Braun thought things in Nigeria
were fine and dandy.
This trip was part of a pattern of dissent
from the direction sought by many black Americans who were appalled
by Nigerian human rights abuses. In 1996, she disagreed with
the Congressional Black Caucus by opposing sanctions against
Nigeria.
Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. said, "It
is unfortunate that the senator's trip gives the impression of
lending legitimacy to an illegitimate regime in Nigeria."
Randall Robinson, founder of the Africa
advocacy organization, Trans-Africa, noted, "I don't see
how someone who can argue and fight for sanctions against South
Africa can argue against sanctions against Nigeria. This is an
undemocratic, mean spirited, corrupt and cancerous regime."
Moseley Braun defended her trip last
month in a radio interview over Pacifica Radio's "Democracy
Now" morning program, saying "I went to the funeral
of a friend who had been assassinated, and the right wing was
able to convert that into dancing with dictators and overturned
a 25-year record of fighting for human rights. "
The friend of whom she refers to in that
quotation was Ibrahim Abacha, the son of then-dictator Sani Abacha.
However, the Nigerian press was able
to put definitive spin on the Senator's ball of wax by showing
photographs of her with the wife of the country's brutal military
strongman.
Newsweek magazine commented that "the
meeting between Maryam Abacha and Democratic Sen. Carol Moseley-Braun
of Illinois was less a debate over democratic values than it
was an occasion for tea and sympathy. ,
The Nigerian pro junta newspaper This
Day reported, " "Caroline Moseley-Brown [sic] commended
the role of the first lady in the support and promotion of Family
Values,", "and the general improvement of the welfare
of Nigerian families."
What family values? Abacha opponents
both inside and outside Nigeria reject that argument. "The
poor are already hurting because of this illegitimate regime,"
says Nwiza Muntahali, a spokesman for TransAfrica, a Washington-based
prodemocracy lobbying group. "There's no medicine, no books.
Universities are shutting down. People can't be hurt more than
they already are."
Owens Wiwa, the brother of Ken Saro-Wiwa,
a medical doctor who now lives in Canada, noted during the "Democracy
Now" interview that after his brother was hanged that their
mother and lots of Ogoni women were prevented from wearing black.
" If you wore black, you were arrested and beaten and some
of the women were raped.
The churches -- there was an order that
no church should mention or pray for the soul of ken and the
other eight people who were killed."
The Nigerian trip became a major issue
in Moseley-Braun's reelection campaign in 1998 and she lost to
Republican Peter Fitzgerald. However, she had a strong ally to
help her continue her career in public service-Bill Clinton who
had enjoyed her spirited lobbying on his behalf during the Monica
Lewinsky scandal.
Clinton nominated her as Ambassador to
New Zealand and Samoa in 1998. Mike Fleshman, the Director of
the Human Rights Commission on Africa commented during the "Democracy
Now" interview last week that"all that President Clinton
required of Abacha at that point was that he change costumes,
and take off his military uniform and put on a suit."
Fleshman continued, "She(Moseley-Braun)
did meet with the Nigerian military dictatorship. She brought
a letter back to President Clinton. It was a back channel. The
Nigerian military rulers used this to head off any threat of
oil sanctions, which was, of course, the demand coming out of
the progressive movement in the African American community in
the United States at that point. She went to the Niger delta
in 1996. It was an attempt to organize the military companies
and the dictatorships.
"She didn't meet with the environmental
rights action or the oppressed suffering Ogoni people. She had
no interest in that. .. she emerged in the U.S. Senate as the
most prominent apologist for the regime and for a Clinton policy
of complaining about human rights abuses and making the most
shallow gestures towards democracy while keeping the oil business
flowing, as usual. That was the real policy." Fleshman quoted
a source in the State Department who said "military government
is unfortunate in Nigeria, but what we need in the United States
is not democracy and human rights, we need a firm hand to keep
the oil companies stable."
Fleshman noted that during the Clinton
administration, U.S. investment in the oil business about doubled.
He stressed, "the volume of Nigerian oil entering the United
States soared during that period. So, it was a time of unprecedented
economic activity between Nigeria's military rulers and their
business partners in the big oil companies and the United States.
Moseley Braun was part of that."
Ms. Moseley-Braun may not be such a good
asset to the Howard Dean team. There may be stones in her shoes
as she is forced to stride down a rocky road with pebbles, hewn
of her own sledgehammer approach to human issues.
Frederick B. Hudson is a columnist for A
Good Black Man. He can be reached at: FHdsn@aol.com
Weekend
Edition Features for February 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
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