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March 21, 2002
David
Vest
Hail
to the Chaff
March 20, 2002
Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire
Robert
Jensen
The
Politics of Pain
and Pleasure
Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise
Rick Giambetti
Prozac
and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy
Philip Farruggio
Bullies
Lori Allen
Live
from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation
March
19, 2002
Tariq
Ali
Nuke
Iraq?
Phyllis
Pollack
Roger
Daltrey's LA Surprise
Amir Ahmadi
War-Mongering
Academics:
The New Tartuffe
Ben White
Bomber
Blair
Fran Shor
Child-Murderers
and Madmen
March
18, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Crazy
is Cool
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
What's Playing At My House
Armen
Khanbabyan
The
Pentagon in the Caucasus:
Georgia Is Only the Beginning
Gabriel
Ash
Abdullah
v. Osama
Bernard
Weiner
Middle
East for Dummies
Alexander
Cockburn
Tipping
in America
March
17, 2002
David
Vest
The
Politics of Packaging
Tariq
Ali
The
Left's New Empire Loyalists
March
16, 2002
Chris
Floyd
Ashcroft's
Secret Snatches
March 15, 2002
Doron Rosenblum
Israel's Settler Warlords
Alex Lynch
Rhetorical
Attacks On Iraq
Norman Madarasz
Neo-Con Propaganda
and the National Review
Paul-Marie
de La Gorce
Making
Enemies
March
14, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
RIP
Danny Pearl
Francis
Boyle
Bush
Nuke Plan Violates International Law, Again
Wayne
Saunders
Memo
to Paul McCartney:
There Are Two Kinds
of Freedom, Sir
H.P. Albarelli
Anthrax
Cover-up?
March
13, 2002
Amira
Hass
Are
the Occupied Protecting the Occupier?
CounterPunch
Wire
National
Review Editors Suggest Nuking Mecca
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Personal
Responsibility
for Corporate Elites?
Robert
Fisk
Arabs
Don't Want US
to Strike Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
When
Billy Graham Wanted
to Kill One Million People
March
12, 2002
Kay Lee
Dangerous
Changes in
California's Prisons
John Patrick
Leary
The
Return of Otto Reich
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Hani Shukrallah
This
is the Way the World Ends
Tommy
Ates
Bush's
New Nuke Policy:
Target Allies and Enemies
Lidia Andrusenko
The Great
Chicken War:
Bush v. Putin
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time of Chaos
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
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March 21, 2002
The Stars & Stripes:
Killing for the Flag
By Jason McQuinn, Chuck
Munson
and Tom Wheeler
The U.S. is the only nation-state to have been
condemned by the World Court for international terrorism. The
U.S. vetoed a UN Security Council resolution calling on governments
to observe international law. After deliberately targeting the
civilian public health infrastructure, the U.S. military imposes
a continuing economic blockade on Iraq which has directly  resulted
in the deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of children.
The U.S. government is the primary financier and arms supplier
for the decades-long Israeli war against the entire Palestinian
people. The U.S. armed forces and U.S. organized and/or financed
ally or proxy forces have killed millions upon millions of civilians
since the end of World War II. This is the not-so-hidden meaning
of the Stars and Stripes as the vast majority of people around
the world understand it.
Now the U.S. government has begun what
it bills as an open-ended "War on Terrorism," which
conveniently ignores the fact that in the late Twentieth Century
and the beginning of the Twenty-first Century it is the United
States of America that, by its own definition, is the most prolific
terrorist force in the world. While at the same time U.S. leaders
are choosing to target whichever individuals, organizations,
regimes and/or nation-states--among the wide array of opponents
of U.S. policies--are deemed most convenient this week, leaving
the rest for next week, next year or the next decade. This is,
of course, a recipe for perpetual war, which is as well understood
by President Bush and the other architects of the "New World
Order," as it was by the architects of a similar project
of world empire that was proudly proclaimed the Third Reich,
under a flag with a similarly not-so-hidden meaning.
Perpetual war serves a number of purposes
for the present administration. It is under wartime conditions
that the U.S. state will, at least initially, face the least
resistance as it finishes the now over two century-long process
of gutting the Bill of Rights and voiding the inconvenient parts
of the U.S. Constitution. It is under conditions of war that
the campaign to defeat the anti-globalization movement can be
fought with increasingly militant and dirty tactics. It is under
wartime conditions that all opponents of U.S. policies anywhere
in the world, including within the U.S. itself, can be most easily
labeled "terrorist," at the same time that the mass
media can be most easily mobilized as a total propaganda machine.
And it is under conditions of war that the arms production, oil
production and military technology corporations that funded President
Bush's election by the Supreme Court will be most handsomely
rewarded without too many questions ever being asked. And best
of all, wartime conditions lend themselves to the easy mobilization
of xenophobic, politically reactionary, flag-waving patriotism.
The kind where a complete and utter absence of popular intelligence
is made up for by the cathartic release of long pent-up anger
at being forced to live under frustrating conditions in an alienating
world with no real hope for any beneficial social change in sight.
However, while conditions of perpetual
war may be fortuitous for the fortunes of the current regime
and its backers right now, there is little reason to believe
that the game won't end a lot earlier than they think. In fact,
there are already clouds on the horizon that will only grow more
threatening: the unhappy reactions of regimes the world over
that are disquieted by an American rogue state increasingly out
of control, the pleas of would-be allies that will continue to
be destabilized by their bullying, rapacious "friend,"
the glaring failure to derail the anti-globalization movement
around the world (with only a partial exception within the U.S.
itself, where it has been slowed more effectively), the meltdown
of the Argentinean economy under the conditions imposed by the
IMF (with the threat of others always looming), the failure of
the current Israeli strategy of an accelerating campaign of war
crimes, and the growing wave of international opinion condemning
the American project of empire-which the massive, ongoing covert
and overt propaganda war has so-far failed to dent. Waving a
hundred million flags all around the country won't make these
problems for empire go away.
And even within the U.S., it's only a
matter of time before the population tires of a war without any
foreseeable resolution against enemies that must be continually
manufactured. The longer the war on terrorism continues, the
less enthusiastic will be the flag-waving and cheering for more
bombing campaigns, the mass starvation now in full-swing in Afghanistan,
and the continuing delays and frustrations demanded for internal
security. Even with the full complicity of the mainstream U.S.
media in its efforts to promote perpetual war, dissatisfaction
and dissension will once again arise, until even the biggest,
most impressive American flags fail to cover up all the crimes
against innocent men, women and children throughout the world
required to keep the empire of American capitalism growing.
Jason McQuinn, Chuck Munson and Tom Wheeler
serve as the editorial collective at the Alternative
Press Review.
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