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Inside the New Print Edition of CounterPunch: Labor at the Crossroads

First the Wedding; Now the Wake: Big Labor's New Unity Partnership by JoAnn Wypijewski; Report from Baghdad: How Did the Votes Add Up: by Patrick Cockburn. Tsunamis of Blood: Wolfowitz in Indonesia: by Joseph Nevins; ALSO Alexander Cockburn on Tsunami Aid: How the People Scored. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! 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 donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Today's Stories

March 5 / 6, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Arnold vs. the Nurses

March 4, 2005

Frederick Hudson
Caught in a Cage

 

March 3, 2005

Pat Williams
"Social Security Protects the Young as Much as the Old"

Brian Cloughley
Headlines, Beliefs and Deceptions

Dave Lindorff
Why Do the Democrats Pamper Greenspan?

Amira Hass
Oslo All Over Again

Greg Moses
In Oscar Texas: One Down, One to Go?

Lynne Landes
Exit Poll Madness

Nelson P. Valdés
Rapture Takes Leftists

John Ross
Mexico's Fox Schemes to Jail Front-Running Leftist

Wars of the Laptop Bombers

 

March 2, 2005

Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The "Noble Liars" Attack Syria

Mike Roselle
The State of Oregon vs. Mike Roselle: Criminalizing Environmental Dissent

M. Junaid Alam
Columbia University and the New Anti-Semitism

Suzan Mazur
Inside the Polygamy Cults of Southern Utah

Jackson Thoreau
Texas Congressman Calls for "Nuking Syria"

Michael Donnelly
No Love for Teresa Heinz; John Edwards Gets a Pass

Jeffrey St. Clair
Uncle Bucky Makes a Killing

Website of the Day
The Ghosts of Karl Marx & Ed Abbey

 

March 1, 2005

Scott Richard Lyons
Million Dollar Bigotry

David Lindorff
Stealing Workers' Pensions

Patrick Cockburn / David Enders
Bloodbath in Iraq

Ron Jacobs
The Last Poets Recalled

Tanya Garcia
USA Next: the Industry Front Group to Privatize Social Security

Joseph Pietri
The Drug Trail Ends in Kathmandu: Golden Tar Heroin and the Black Prince

Kona Lowell
Woody: Broken in Vietnam

Paul Craig Roberts
The Coming End of the American Superpower

Website of the Day
Petition: No US Intervention in Iran

 

 

February 28, 2005

Gary Leupp
Year 4 in the Five Year Plan: a June Attack on Iran?

Bill Quigley
Haitian Police Open Fire on Nonviolent Marchers

Mickey Z.
The Million Dollar Interview: Mary Johnson on Clinton Eastwood, Hunter Thompson and the "Right to Die"

Paul de Rooij
Why Ted Honderich is Wrong on All Counts About Israel

David Swanson
Basic Income Guarantee Versus the Corp Media

Mario Lamo Jimenez
Maria Full of Cultural Contradictions at the Oscars

Emma Perez
The Attacks on Ward Churchill: a Test Case in the Neocons Purge of Academia

Diana Johnstone
Censorship and the Empire

Website of the Day
Stop the War Campaign!

 

 

February 26 / 27, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
An American Jew Laments Decline in Jewish Influence

Noam Chomsky
Nuclear Terror at Home

Rev. William E. Alberts
Rhetoric in the Air; Reality on the Ground

Fred Gardner
AARP Gets Pot-Baited

Gary Leupp
Bush and Camus on Freedom

Saul Landau
An Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon (Part 3): the Miami Mafia

Robin Philpot
Second Thoughts on the Hotel Rwanda

Yitkhak Laor
In Praise of the Facts

Ben Tripp
Out of Sight; Out of Mind

Justin Taylor
Zizek Seen Over the Handlebars

Jack Random
The Wounds from Wounded Knee

Rafael Renteria
Ward Churchill and White America

Jim B.
Reflections on the Eve of Fatherhood

Seth DeLong
Land Reform in Venezuela: More Like Lincoln Than Lenin

John Chuckman
A Season of Depressing Political Reruns

Alison Weir
Relativity, LA Times Style

Richard Oxman
Political Solitude: From Garcia Marquez to Maria Full of Grace

Dr. Susan Block
It Always Rains in California: All About Female Ejaculation

Poets' Basement
Landau, Lowell, Louise, Davies, Soderstrom, Norris & Albert

 

February 25, 2005

Roger Burbach
Murder in the Amazon

Behzad Yaghmaian
Iranian Distrust of America: 50 Years in the Making

Kurt Nimmo
Conclave of the Brats

Joshua Frank
Diagnosing the Green Party

John Farley
How to Stop the War in Iraq: Punish Pro-War Politicians

Lawrence Reichard
The D'Aubuisson Memorial: Flowers of Evil

Pratyush Chandra
The Royal Coup in Nepal and Global Imperialist Designs

David Smith-Ferri
When the Battlefield has No Borders

Website of the Day
The 2005 Election in 3-D

 

February 24, 2005

Omar Waraich
The Galloway Saga: Smearing an Anti-War Politician

Brian Cloughley
Bribing and Twisting Amerian Journalists: Valerie Plame & 30 Pieces of Silver

Tom Wright
Torture Nation: Abu Ghraib, a Year Later

Sharon Smith
The Anti-War Movement After Kerry: Learning All the Wrong Lessons

Dave Lindorff
Do These Roosting Chickens Have Flu?

Fred Feldman
Lynching Ward Churchill

James Reiss
On Hearing About a Plot to Assassinate President Bush

Diane Christian
Bad Blood: Ritual & Sexual Torture in Iraq

Website of the Day
The Gray Line

 

 

February 23, 2005

Werther
The Poisoned Well: What the CIA's Nazi Files Can Tell Us About Iraq

W. John Green
A Salvador Option for Iraq? How Negroponte Changes the Ground Rules

James Petras
A New Face to Bush Foreign Policy?

Conn Hallinan
Cornering the Dragon: the Return of the China Lobby

Joe Pietri
Cannabis: the Goose that Lays Golden Eggs (For Consumers and Cops)

Louis Proyect
Hunter Thompson and the "New" Journalism

Alexander Cockburn
Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo

Website of the Day
Did You Make the Blacklist? Why Not?

 

February 22, 2005

Naseer Aruri
The Politics of the Hariri Assassination: Remapping the Middle East

Richard Manning
The Economy of Hunger: Starvation is Part of the Economic Plan

William A. Cook
Righteous Racism Running Rampant

Paul Craig Roberts
The Agents of Instability

Ken Krayeske
Dr. Thompson is Out

Dave Zirin
How the Owners Destroyed the NHL

Kirkpatrick Sale
Imperial Entropy: the Collapse of the American Empire

 

 

February 21, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson
"He Was A Crook"

John Ross
Mexico: the Pentagon's Proxy Army in Iraq

Ward Churchill
What Did I Really Say? Why Did I Say It?

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Military Recruiting on Channel One: Geometry 101, Brought to You by the US Navy

David Swanson
Fighting for a Living Wage, State by State

Dave Lindorff
All the News That's Fit to Fake

Stew Albert
Fear and Loathing: HST

Michael Neumann
Strategies in Palestine: a Shrinking Pie in the Sky

 

 

February 19 / 20, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Back to Salem: Paul Shanley and the Return of "Recovered Memory"

Kathleen Christison
Struggling for Justice in Palestine

Ted Honderich
On Being Persona Non Grata

Gary Leupp
Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House & Welcome to Commit Suicide

Don Santina
Reparations for the Blues

Jennifer Roesch
John Negroponte: Dirty Warrior

Scott Richard Lyons
Ward Churchill and the Identity Police

Chris Clarke
Ward Churchill and Liberal Outrage

George Beres
Censorship in the Land of Wayne Morse: Gagging W. Churchill in Oregon

Harry Browne
The Belfast Heist: the Plot Unravels

Manuel García, Jr.
Who Killed Rafik Hariri?

Mark Scaramella
Lessons from the Hidden Afghan War

Michael Donnelly
Whatever Happened to John Edwards?

John Pilger
First, They Attack the Past

Norman Madarasz
Death Wish for Reform in Brazil?

Surendra Devkota
The Monarchy in Nepal

Deborah Rich
How Anti-GMO Ballot Measures May Miss the Mark

Fred Gardner
When Dr. Tod Met Merle Haggard

CounterPunch News Service
About King Mswati: Political Developments in Swaziland

Richard Oxman
CounterPunching Arthur Miller

Poets' Basement
Albert, Giebel, Tripp, Engel and Orkin

 

February 18, 2005

Ben Moxham
In East Timor, the Nightmare Continues

Dave Lindorff
The Scum Also Rises: the Bloody Career of John Negroponte

Larry Birns
Negroponte: a Resume of Death Squads, Deceptions and Bribery

Gregory Elich
N, Korea's Phantom Nukes and the US's Subversion of Diplomacy

Samuel Logan / John Meyers
The Future of Colombia's Paramilitary Death Squads

Nicole Colson
Shock and Awe on Civil Liberties: From Lynne Stewart to Ward Churchill

Suzan Mazur
Whose National Security Are We Talking About?

Mickey Z.
"One Man Has Stopped Killing"

 

 

February 17, 2005

Joshua Frank
Hogtying of the Deaniacs

Paul Craig Roberts
Bush's Willing Sychophants: the Conservative Media

Robert Fisk
Under the Shadow of Death in Lebanon

Christopher Brauchli
Where Time Stands Still: Kinsey and Darwin in Cobb County, GA

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Military Recruitment TV: Why Send Them to College, When Your Kid Can be Cannon Fodder?

Alison Weir
Russia, Israel and Media Omissions

Ahrar Ahmad
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Is There an Islamic Problem?"

Saul Landau
An Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon: "The US Tramples the Laws It Wrote"

Website of the Day
Petition to Support Ward Churchill

 

 

February 16, 2005

Robert Fisk
Lebanon: a Battlefield for the Wars of Others

Kevin Zeese
Creating a Real Ownership Society: Share the Wealth; Protect Retirement

Gary Leupp
Meanwhile, in Nepal...

Ron Jacobs
Why the Iranian Opposition Should Not Trust the Bush Administration

Jessica Leight
Oil-Flush Chavez Begins to Strut His Stuff

Greg Moses
Houston, You've Got a Problem: Documenting Voting Irregularities in Texas

Mark Engler
The Last Porto Alegre

Jack McCarthy
Where's the Outrage About Pat? Buchanan Does a Churchill

Bill Christison
US Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel

Website of the Day
The World is Melting: a Photo Survey by Gary Braasch

 

 

February 15, 2005

CounterPunch News Service
Dean a "Safe" Moderate, Says NYT Citing CounterPunch

Robert Fisk
The Killing of Mr. Lebanon

Uri Avnery
"Sharm-al-Sheikh, We Have Come Back Again"

Stan Cox
Fighting Big Pharma in Little Digwal

Mickey Z.
Radio Active North of the Border: an Interview with Chris Cook

Dave Zirin
Bashing Bush: Jose Canseco Comes Clean

Nadia Martinez
Ending World Poverty? Opening at the World Bank, Apply Now

Lila Rajiva
"Little Eichmanns" and the 'Harijan': the Danger of Magical Thinking in Politics

Paul Craig Roberts
The American Job Sell Out

 

 

February 14, 2005

Robert Jensen
Ward Churchill: Right to Speak Out; Right About 9/11

Brian Cloughley
Kuwait's Freedom, Bush-style

Patrick Cockburn
Outcome of the Iraqi Elections: Shortages, Corruption, Guerrilla War

Gary Leupp
Post-election Iraq: What Next?

Michael Donnelly
Sacred Nature: Just Another Commodity?

Dave Lindorff
When Bush Came to My Neighborhood

Elaine Cassel
The Lynne Stewart Verdict

 

February 12 / 13, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Ward Churchill's Genes

Saul Landau
Alarcon Speaks: an Interview with the Vice President of Cuba

Paul Craig Roberts
Nothing to Fear But Bush Himself

Patrick Cockburn
Two Years After the Fall of Saddam, the Resistance Controls All Major Roads into Baghdad

John Feffer
Bush v. N. Korea: Round Two

Mickey Z.
Right to Remain Silent; Duty to Speak

Kurt Nimmo
Viva la Cucaracha!

Fred Gardner
Waiting for Raich

Dave Zirin
Fighting the New Republic(ans)

John Chuckman
Hiroshima, Mon Amour

Ben Tripp
A Leftist on the Bush Payroll

Carol Norris
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Dwarf?"

Robert Fisk
No Middle East Peace Without Justice

Frank / Chowkwanyun
Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror: the Case of Sherman Austin

Mike Whitney
Condi's Euro Tour

Deborah Frisch
A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Reading Khomeini in Colorado

Christine TenBarge
What's So Special About Ward?

Ron Jacobs
Curtis Mayfield's Train to Jordan

Dr. Susan Block
Chemistry of Love: a Valentine's Greeting

Poets' Basement
Louise, Smith-Ferri, Ford and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Free Sherman

 

 

February 11, 20055

Manuel Garcia, Jr
The Eight Percent War

Kurt Nimmo
Ann Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need Him?

Dave Lindorff
Guckert or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In

Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott Abrams

Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz

Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion

Jennifer Van Bergen
Lynne Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All

 

 

February 10, 2005

Dave Lindorff
What Academic Freedom?

Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq

Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed

Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?

Suzan Mazur
More on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha

Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition

Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little Hope"

Greg Moses
Taking Jesus Back from the Hijackers

Website of the Day
The Missionary Positions

 

 

February 9, 2005

Jeffrey St. Clair
Duck and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers

Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say

John Ross
Hecho en Mexico: the Iraqi Election

Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon

Conn Hallinan
The Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion

Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely Forbidden"

Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions

Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

 

 

February 8, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral Pact, Not a Party"

Brian Cloughley
Out of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"

Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"

Harry Browne
"Don't Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland

Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President and Ward Churchill

Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the Same Beast

Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper

David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq

 

 

February 7, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Bush's War on Jobs

Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher Ed

Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill

Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill

Patrick Cockburn
The Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism

Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried

Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI

Tariq Ali
Imperial Delusions

 

 

 

February 5 / 6, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs

Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day

Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill

P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami

Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust

Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story

Pamela Olson
West Bank Story

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West

Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court

Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents

Robert Fisk
History by Laptop

David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome

Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada

Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love

Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life

Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside

Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy

Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the Game

Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert

Website of the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File

 

February 4, 2005

Brian Cloughley
The Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"

Bill Christison
Election Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005

Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?

Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft

Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal

Ron Jacobs
The Downward Spiral in Iraq

 

 

February 3, 2005

Ward Churchill
On the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications and Gross Distortions

Sharon Smith
Resisting Soldiers Need Our Support

Mickey Z.
Leslie Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?

Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union

Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan

Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq

Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence

Dave Lindorff
The Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies

 

 

February 2, 2005

David Domke / Kevin Coe
Bush's Brand of Christianity

Noam Chomsky
Iraq After the Elections

M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me in Its Crosshairs

Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen

Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean

Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT

Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn

Website of the Day
War is a Racket

 

 

February 1, 2005

Joshua L. Dratel
The Torture Memos

Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi

Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"

Uri Avnery
The Stalemate

Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal

Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel

Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades

Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified Voters

Paul Craig Roberts
American Police State

Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

December 22, 2004

James Petras
An Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre Historical Amnesia

Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel

Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit

Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge

Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column

Kathleen Christison
Imagining Palestine

Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos

 

 

December 21, 2004

Greg Moses
The New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV

Dave Lindorff
Losing It in America: Bunker of the Skittish

Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk

Dragon Pierces Truth*
Concrete Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam

Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"

Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti

Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report

Paul Craig Roberts
America Locked Up: a System of Injustice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Weekend Edition
March 5 / 6, 2005

Let the Pentagon Pay Off Those Loans

Lies Military Recruiters Tell

By RON JACOBS

Recently, most students at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington received an email with the heading ARMY PAYS OFF STUDENT LOANS in their university email box. The general message of the mass mailing was that if a student was nearing graduation and wondering how they were going to pay off the massive debt today's US college students incur, they should join the army. In essence, this email was a college student's version of the poverty draft that entraps so many working class and poor young people into enlisting in the service. The sender was a military recruiter working out of the US Army recruitment office in the Burlington suburb of Williston. Given that the university has a very clear policy forbidding these types of solicitations on their email servers one wonders how the recruiting office was able to obtain the address list. The university administration has been reticent when asked this question by various faculty, students, and parents. It is fair to assume, however, that the email list was released to the recruiter under the compliance sections of the so-called Solomon Amendment. For those unfamiliar with this legislation, it essentially forbids Department of Defense (DOD) funding of schools unless those schools provide military representatives access to their students for recruiting purposes. It is this same law that enables military recruiters to set up shop in high schools across the US and to call students at their homes attempting to entice them into joining the military.

At UVM, this email was met with anger and questions, and probably even a few inquiries. The anger is now being organized into a drive to keep military recruiters off the university campus and out of the students' private communications. There is a petition campaign underway that demands that no recruiters for the regular military or the Vermont National Guard be allowed recruit on campus. Despite this, recruiters do show up unannounced on campus. One assumes that their strategy is designed to prevent student organizers from organizing protests against the recruiters' presence. In addition, there is organizing underway to organize some kind of response to the military and Guard's presence at the University's Spring Career Day on March 8th. (This career day is also the host to recruiters from various corporations from the war industry-General Dynamics foremost among them) Here in Vermont, the Guard recruitment hits close to home, since the state ranks near the top in the number of deaths per capita in Iraq. The likelihood of the university denying these recruiters access is slim, especially in light of the mass email, yet the students involved continue on undaunted. If the petition campaign fails to produce the results they desire, there will likely be some kind of protest.

Other college campuses have already experienced such protests. On January 20, 2005, several hundred students at Seattle Central Community College chased army recruiters from their spot in the Student center. On February 23, campus police arrested a woman student during a picket in front of the military's recruitment table at a job fair at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A couple days before that, several dozen students chased military recruiters off campus at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU). In September 2004, more than a hundred students protested the presence of military recruiters at the University of Pennsylvania. On February 22, 2005 several dozen students picketed recruiters at the University of Illinois campus in Chicago. At the USC Law School, recruiters were met with pickets and leafleters demanding that they leave, and at UC Berkeley, a couple dozen students protested the presence of a military recruiter table there. These are but a few of the dozens of protests that have taken place.

Meanwhile, in high schools across the US, more students and their parents seem to be opting out of taking the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB), a test given to high school juniors as a method of targeting potential recruits. It is an admissions and placement test for the US military. All persons enlisting in the US military are required to take the ASVAB. Although the military does not usually start turning up the pressure to join the military until students reach their senior year, about 14,000 high schools nationwide give this test to juniors. A recent piece in the Boston Globe detailed the troubles one recruiting office in New Hampshire is facing this year. According to ASVAB testing coordinator at the Military Entrance Processing Station in Boston, which handles enlistment processing for Rhode Island, much of New Hampshire and parts of Massachusetts, many parents are writing notes excusing their kids from taking the test. At one high school in Nashua, NH, school administrators opted out of even administering the test this year. This is not an isolated case either; of the thirty schools in the Boston region that administered the test in 2004, only nineteen signed up to do so this year. One wonders how long it will be before the military makes the test mandatory for graduation.

Campus antiwar groups that formed in the past three years have called most of the university and college protests. In addition, lesbian and gay organizations and individuals have joined in because of their opposition to the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on homosexuality. Of course, many of the latter group also opposes the war in Iraq. According to a federal appeals court ruling made in November 2004, the essentially anti-gay policies of the military do allow universities to deny its recruiter's access to their students and property. On top of that ruling, another federal judge in Connecticut found that the government unconstitutionally applied the Solomon Amendment after Yale Law School faculty sued Donald Rumsfeld when he attempted to deny federal funds to Yale because it prevented military recruitment on its campus. Yale denied the recruiters access because of their discriminatory policies against gays and lesbians.

While this strategy is not necessarily the best political strategy possible to chase recruiters off campus, it is a legal tool counter-recruitment activists should utilize while it exists. In my mind, the best political strategy is one that challenges the imperial policies of the US and calls into question not just the military's discriminatory recruitment policies, but also the role of the military itself. A strategy based on this premise would not only diminish the military's visibility, it would also challenge young people (and the rest of us) to examine for whom and what the military really fights. Additionally, it would allow the organizers of these campaigns to include defense contractors in their campaign. After all, it is these corporations that truly need young men and women to go to war.

A list of links providing information and avenues of action around this issue can be found here: www.groups.yahoo.com/groups/militaryrecruitment/links

 

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