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Today's Stories

May 7, 2005

Gary Leupp
Biblical Prophecy and Christian Zionism

May 6, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad Diary: a Week of Bombs and Blood

Erin Yoshioka
Another "3 Strikes" Travesty: Why is Santo Reyes Facing Life in Prison?

Sam Husseini
Talking with Syrians

Dave Lindorff
Ernie Pyle Where Are You? When Reporters were Reporters

Kevin Zeese
Circus Trials of Abu Ghraib: When Even the Fall Girl Can't Plead Guilty

Joshua Frank
An Overextended US Military? It Won't Stop Another War

Dan Bacher
Tribes and Salmon Win One: Bush Backs Off Trinity River Water Raid

P. Saineth
India's Bloody Water Wars

 

May 5, 2005

Carles Mutaner
Is Chavez's Venezuela "Socialist" or "Populist?"

Carl G. Estabrook
Is There Any Hope for the Pope?

Farrah Hassen
The US's Syrian Obsession

Kevin Zeese
"Sent Into Combat Unequipped and Unprepared": an Interview with Patrick Resta

Michael Leonardi
May Day with an American Soldier in Rome

Bennett Ramberg
The Future of Nuclear Terror: Coming to a Reactor Near You

Ray McGovern
The Smoking Gun on White House Deceit

Norman Solomon
Nuclear Fundamentalism, the New York Times and Iran

Nicole Colson
The Back Alley Attack on Abortion Rights

Brian Concannon, Jr.
Clearing the Fences in Haiti

 

May 4, 2005

Colin Kalmbacher
Ann Coulter and the Police State: Heckle a Racist, Get Arrested

John Walsh
Al Franken is a Big Fat Phony: Lying on Air America to Support the War

Greg Moses
Vigilante Wedge: Schwarzenegger Reprises "Birth of a Nation"

Ali Khan
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Poised to Fall Apart

Chris Floyd
Ring Them Bells

Linda S. Heard
D-Day for Tony Blair: Bogeymen and Scare Tactics

Dave Zirin
The NFL, Congress and the Male Cheerleader Principle

William S. Lind
Fool's Paradise

Gary Leupp
Bolton's Proudest Moment: Breaking the UN's Anti-Zionist Resolution

Website of the Day
Kent State, May 4, 1970

 

 

May 3, 2005

Dave Lindorff
Bush has Grasped the Third Rail, Now Turn on the Juice

Brian Cloughley
Halliburton's War Loot

Ira Kurzban
Death Squad Diplomacy: How Bolton Armed Haiti's Thugs and Killers

Seth Sandronsky
Towards Debtors' Prisons?

Gilad Atzmon
The Labour Party Isn't an Option Any More

Michael Donnelly
Branding Eco Collapse

Alex Sanchez
Chile's Man at the OAS: a Blow to Bush?

Peter Linebaugh
Magna Carta and May Day

 

 

May 2, 2005

Ron Jacobs
Toward an Anti-Imperialist Movement

Stan Goff
The Case of Hasan Akbar

Karyn Strickler
Achieving Gender Balance in US Politics

Joshua Frank
Leaked UK Memo Indict's Blair's Iraq Folly

Kevin Zeese
Getting Out of Iraq will Prove Tougher Than Getting Out of Vietnam

Vicente Navarro
Pope Benedict: a Rightwing Politician

 

 

 

April 30 / May 1, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Marla Ruzicka, Rachel Corrie and "Credibility"

Gabriel Kolko
Lessons from a Total Defeat: the End of the Vietnam War, 30 Years Later

Jennifer Loewenstein
The Disengaged: Gaza and the Fragmentation of Palestinian Nationhood

Lee Sustar
City for Sale: Richard Daley's Chicago

Saul Landau
The Bush-DeLay Axis of Naked Power

T.W. Croft
The Undiscovered Country: the High Tide of the Neo-Con Confederacy

Nikolas Kozloff
Fox News v. Hugo Chavez

William Blum
Never-Ending Double Standards

Dave Lindorff
Judicial Jury Tampering in Philly

Joshua Frank
The Bi-Partisan Assault on Teenage Girls

Doug Giebel
Saving Jane Fonda

Steven Erlanger
A Response to Kathy Christison, from the NYT Jerusalem Bureau Chief

Fred Gardner
Washington State Doctor Harassed

Mike Whitney
Another Mad Bush Press Conference

Kurt Nimmo
Putin Pussyfoots in Palestine

Joe DeRaymond
A Short History of the 15th Congressional District of Pennsylvania

Michael Dickinson
Flags

Mickey Z.
May Day at Yankee Stadium

Justin Taylor
The Crawling Chaos: HP Lovecraft's Polymorphous Legacy

Poets Basement
Krieger, Engel, Albert, St. Clair

Website of the Weekend
Save Barbados's Cowpastor

 

April 29, 2005

W. John Green
Rice in Colombia: Silence on the Death Squads?

Luke Brothers
Greenwashing Nuclear Power: Nicholas Kristof, the John Stossel of the NYT

Norman Solomon
War, Aid and Public Relations

M. Junaid Alam
The Politics of Smears and Self-Absorption

Jackie Corr
The Bush Budget and Constitutionally Protected Tax Havens

Hunter Greer
Feeding Tubes and the SAT: Finally, a Use for Standardized Testing!

Sharon Smith
The New Assault on Women's Rights: Why are the Democrats Silent?

Website of the Day
Tony Blair's Election Rap

 

April 28, 2005

Omar Waraich
Blair's Poodle: the Billy Bragg Interview

Kevin Zeese
Abu Ghraib One Year Later: Have Those Responsible Gotten Off?

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Torture Tort Reform

Greg Moses
Why I'm Not Standing with the Gringo Vigilantes

Toni Solo
Nicaragua on a Dollar a Day...Forever?

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Republican Dole Drums; Democrats in Doldrums

Werther
George Will Revises the Vietnam War

 

April 27, 2005

John Ross
Pope Ratzo and the Hucksters of Death

Joshua Frank
DeLay, Abramoff and Israeli Militias

Ray McGovern
The Bolton Affair: More Than Meets the Eye

Mark Donham
Government Pettiness and Wetland Destruction

Dan Smith
Bush's Iraq Poker: Hold, Fold, or Raise?

 

 

April 26, 2005

Dave Lindorff
Church Sex Trumps Torture and Murder

Alevtina Rea
Magic of the Yellow Emperor

Greg Moses
The Senator and the Narc Pirates of Highway 281

Joshua Frank
Horowitz's Gang of Ghouls and Cowards on Ruzicka

Diana Johnstone
The French are At It Again

 

 

April 25, 2005

Uri Avnery
The Persecution of Vanunu

Alison Weir
The Okrent Perversions: How the NYT Minimizes Palestinian Deaths

Lee Sustar
Labor Loses a Hero: the Strong Life of Dave Yettaw

Leonardo Boff
A Liberation Theologist on Ratsinger: a Pope of Fear and Centralized Power?

Gary Leupp
Bush's Bully: the Career of John Bolton

 

 

 

 

 

 

April 23 / 24, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Time's Buried Hitler Cover

Gary Leupp
The Anti-Japanese Demonstrations in China

James Petras
Elections for Democracy or Empire?

Harry Browne
Springsteen's "Devils and Dust"

Fred Gardner
The Custody Threat

Ron Jacobs
The Desterrados of Colombia: They are not Collateral Damage

Elizabeth Schulte
Why Backing Democrats is Pulling the Anti-War Mvt. to the Right

Chris Floyd
Oil, Guns and Banks

 

April 22, 2005

Saul Landau
The Kinky Moralists: Missionaries Forever

Kevin Zeese
Dean Backs the Iraq Occupation

Joshua Frank
Earth Day Paradox: Enviros vs. Nature

Mike Whitney
God's Rottweiller: Pope Ratzinger's Pie-in-the-Sky for the Masses

Michael Flynn
Wolfowitz on Top of the World

Lee Sustar
The One-Sided Class War

Website of the Day
Bitter Greens

 

April 21, 2005

Bill Quigley
The Church Picks Its Ashcroft for Pope: a Catholic Worker Response to the Rise of Ratsinger

Dave Lindorff
Bush's X-Files

Jason Leopold
Drilling and Spilling in ANWR: Worse Than the Exxon Valdez?

Kathleen Christison
Sharon's 92 Percent Solution: How the Misperceptions Roll On


April 20, 2005

 

April 20, 2005

John Ross
Lopez Obrador: Mexico's Would-be Mandela (Part Two)

Kevin Zeese
Halliburton: Poster Child of the War Profiteers

Uri Avnery
The 100 Days of Abu Mazen

Website of the Day
The House that Jack Built

 

April 19, 2005

Jean-Guy Allard
An Exclusive CP Interview with Ricardo Alarcon on One of the World's Most Notorious Terrorists: "Is Posada Still Working for the White House?"

Dave Lindorff
What's Good for Canada is Good for GM: Health Care Costs and Job Flight

Neve Gordon
Before the Law: Israel's Military Justice System in the Occupied Territories

Brian Concannon, Jr
Immaculate Evasions in Haiti

Murray Hudson
Chemical Warfare Over Tennessee: Aerial Spraying of Deadly Pesticides

Frank B. Ford
Poem for Marla Ruzicka

Monty Python
Memo to Pope Rat

Michael Dickinson
Cardinal Sins

Paul Craig Roberts
Outsourcing the American Economy: a Greater Threat Than Terrorism

Website of the Day
Strindberg and Helium


April 18, 2005

Linda Schade / Kevin Zeese
The Carter-Baker Commission: Corporate Conflicts of Interest

John Ross
Mexico's Would-Be Mandela Stares into the Darkness

Brian McKenna
Dow Chemical Buys Silence in Michigan

Mike Whitney
The NYT in Fallujah

Patrick Cockburn
Iraqi Peace in Tatters

Dave Zirin
Straight Outta High School: Jermaine O'Neal, Race and Hip Hop

Eli Stephens
The Killing of Nicola Calipari: a Math Lesson

Harry Browne
War and Elections in Britain and Ireland

Website of the Day
A16: Photos of the World Bank Protest

 

April 16 / 17, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Message in a Bottle: How Coca-Cola Gave Back to Plachimada

Mark Dow
The Art of Jailing: Inside America's Immigration Gulag

Omar Waraich
Blair's Accountability Moment: Lesser-Evilism Grips Britain

Robert Buzzanco
How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Love Vietnam and Iraq

Sherry Wolf
Bitches' Liberation? Whatever Happened to the Struggle for Women's Liberation?

Fred Gardner
The Pharmaceuticalization of Marijuana

Ron Jacobs
Free Speech with Permission Only: a Tale of Two Universities

Mark Weisbrot
CAFTA will Further Depress US Wages

John Pardon
The High-Tech "Competitiveness" Smokescreen

Yoshie Furuhashi
Debtors of the World Unite! How Dems Went to Bat for the Credit Industry

Mike Roselle
Cubicle of Doom: the Death of Environmentalism?

Ralph Nader
Scientists or Celebrities?

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza: the Line of Memory and Despair

Jackson Thoreau
Barbara Bush: We Should Have Pulled the Plug on Our Daughter

Michael Dickinson
"Imagine" and the Koran: Listening to Lennon in Istanbul

Richard Neville
Shaking the Walls of TwinWorld™

Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel, Curtis, Ford and Gaffney

Website of the Weekend
Rebel Angel

 

 

April 15, 2005

Brian Cloughley
Diplomacy, Bush Style: Boorish Bolton & Arrogant Rice

Bill Glahn
No Child Left a Dime

Mickey Z.
One Zimbabwe or Another: an Interview with Greg Elich

Stephanie McMillan
Fear and Art: Feds Raid Another Exhibit

Josh Mahan
Victoria's Dirty Secret

David Russitano
Will the Real Minutemen Please Stand Up?

Jorge Mariscal
Rodolfo Gonzales: the Passing of a Legend

Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales
"I am Joaquin"

Tom Reeves
Students Rise Again in Québec

 

April 14, 2005

Karyn Strickler
Red States Rebellion: Montana vs. the Patriot Act

Pat Williams
The Flattened Economy of the Rocky Mountain West

Jessica Pupovac
What You Should Know About Bank One's New Daddy

Joshua Frank
Contradictions of the Anti-War Mvt.

Jerzy Mankowski
Jeffrey Sach's Millennium Plan: a View from Poland

Talli Naumann
Right-to-Know in Mexico

Antony Loewenstein
The Aussie Press Under the Empire of Murdoch

Virginia Rodino
Challenging the Empire: Tactics for the Anti-War Movement

Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
Bush's Vision of Arab Democracy vs. Two Reports

Website of the Day
The 13th Moon: Women Poets Read for Peace in Portland

 

 

April 13, 2005

Maria Carrión
Bolton in the Western Sahara

Mike Whitney
Fighting Torture with Art: the Abu Ghraib Paintings of Fernando Botero

Terry Jones
Let Them Eat Bombs

Dave Lindorff
A Sickening Error

Nathaniel Livingston, Jr.
Ethnic Cleansing at Air America

Kurt Nimmo
Israeli Nuclear Blackjack with Iran

Don Fitz
Battling Dengue Fever with Bats and Birds: the Vietnamese Alternative to Pesticides

Tom Crumpacker
Democracy and the Multiparty System: The US and Cuban Experiences

JG
The Abuse of Haitian Kids at PS 34

Jack McCarthy
Horowitz Comes to Tallahassee

Kevin Zeese
Is God Picking a Side in Iraq?: an Interview with Rev. Sekou

Jeffrey St. Clair
How Exxon Used the Guise of Homeland Security to Purge One of Louisiana's Environmental Champions

 

April 12, 2005

John Wheat Gibson
The Goddess of Immigrants: Aeschylus, Thucydides and the Patriot Act

Kevin Zeese
The Time to Oppose a Draft is Now

Alan Farago
The Cancer Clusters of Cape Coral: Toxics Trump Democracy in Florida

Dave Lindorff
Blackout in Montgomery: Selling Social Security Destruction to White Alabamans

Ron Jacobs
Bob Dylan at the Crossroads

Nelson P. Valdes
Flashback: John Bolton's Big Lie

Dave Zirin
War Games and War Names

Website of the Day
Parents Against the Draft

 

 

April 11, 2005

Tom Barry
Negroponte and the Eclipse of the CIA

Saul Landau
Love for the Unborn and Brain Dead: Contempt for the Rest Us

Monique Dols
Scapegoated at Columbia: Smearing Joseph Massad

Phil Gasper
Burning Professors: Resurrection of a Witchhunt

Mike Whitney
See No Evil: Pope TV and the New World Media

Edwin Krales
The Origin of AIDS: an Ethical Inquiry

Paul de Rooij
Undermining Civil Society: Horowitz's Corrosive Projects

Website of the Day
Academic Freedom at Columbia: a Petition

 

 

April 9 / 10, 2005

Jeffrey St. Clair
Torture Air, Incorporated

William A. Cook
Janus at the State Dept.: Glossing Over Israel's Human Rights Abuses

Gary Leupp
My Favorite Papal Moment: a Bonfire in Peru

Alan Maass
Pope-a-Dope: John Paul 2, Death of a Reactionary

Laura Carlsen
Democracy Sinking in Mexico

Joe DeRaymond
Death and Displacement in Colombia

Nikolas Kozloff
Bush Rebuffed in Venezuela (Again)

Dave Lindorff
The Price of Oil and the Bush Dollar

Greg Moses
Growling at Hallliburton

Fred Gardner
Southern Station Session

Justin Smith
The US Prison System: a Hesitant Defense of the Not-Quite-as Bad Old Days

Ron Jacobs
George Bush's True Religion: From Bob Jones to Jim Jones

M. Junaid Alam
No Intelligence Failure in Iraq; Political Failure in the US

Ira Kay
West Point's Bad Geography: the Conqueror's Warped View of the World

Elizabeth Schulte
From McCarthyism to COINTELPRO: the Ongoing War on the Left

Jackie Corr
Stranger in a Strange Land: What Bush Didn't See in Montana

Christopher Brauchli
From Darfur to Iraq: Crime Without Punishment

Leslie A. Fiedler
On Saul Bellow: "The Age of the Jewish-American Novel is Over"

Ben Tripp
Pocket Furniture

Poets Basement
Lamantia, Engel, Louise, Albert and Curtis

Website of the Weekend
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Weekend Edition
May 7 / 8, 2005

Purges, Pedophiles and Cover Ups

Pope Torquemada

By SAUL LANDAU

How does the new Pope connect to Catholic kids persecuting me as a child, especially during Halloween, obstructing justice and shaping US politics?

At age six, growing up in the Bronx, a gang of Irish Catholic kids jumped me and beat me.

As they punched, I asked why.

"You killed our Lord, kid," said a freckled boy of about eight. "We're getting even."

My father bandaged my wounds and told me that the Cossacks in the Ukraine had done worse. "The Cossacks would ride into our village on horses and spear Jewish babies. It's been that way for centuries. It won't change," he reassured me.

As a teenager, I learned the origins of anti-Semitism. "Jews are scapegoats," my father said. "The poor suffer, but instead of blaming those who exploit them, the Church blames the Jews because they supposedly killed Jesus, that momser [Yiddish for bastard]."

On the celibacy of priests, my father asked rhetorically what those guys in robes do with boys at choir practice. "Check them for hemorrhoids and hernias? They shtup [poke] them and then tell the kids to beat up Jews." As I grew older and actually made friends with some of my former persecutors, I learned that the local parish priest had indeed incited the boys to take on the "killers of Christ." My father insisted that the "line" came from Rome, that priests did what the Pope told them to do.

I wonder if those kids who beat me up became priests, bishops and cardinals. They might have become close associates of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) at the time that the Vatican decided to distract attention from the Church's decade-long sex abuse scandal.

As the world became aware of pedophilia in the priesthood, Ratzinger took command of the Vatican's counter offensive, a course that interfered with justice for the victims of priests' abuse and also with US politics. How to direct the public away from the fact that hundreds of priests have taken advantage of kids in their parishes? In the 2004 elections, the Church weighed in on the side of George W. Bush and other candidates who opposed abortion and gay marriage, issues most likely to divert attention away from the scandal.

On August 11, 2004, less than three months before the elections, Ratzinger sent a directive to US Bishops. "The Church teaches that abortion or euthanasia is a grave sin" Citing previous Church doctrine, he warned Catholics. "In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to take part in a propaganda campaign in favor of such a law or vote for it." Christians have a "grave obligation of conscience not to cooperate formally in practices which, even if permitted by civil legislation, are contrary to God's law. Indeed, from the moral standpoint, it is never licit to cooperate formally in evil. ,,,This cooperation can never be justified

"Not all moral issues have the same moral weight as abortion and euthanasia," Ratzinger continued. "For example, if a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment or on the decision to wage war, he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.There may be a legitimate diversity of opinion even among Catholics about waging war and applying the death penalty, but not however with regard to abortion and euthanasia."

So, Ratzinger informed the Bishops, the Pope permitted disagreement on the Iraq War and death penalty, but "regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia, when a person's formal cooperation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), priest should inform him "that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion."

A Catholic voter "would be guilty of formal cooperation with evil, and so unworthy to present himself for Holy Communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stance on abortion or euthanasia." (http://www.tldm.org/News7/Ratzinger.htm)

Some liberal priests defused Ratzinger's directive, but Bush won 6% more Catholic votes than in 2000, an edge that turned swing close states like Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico.

The Ratzinger letter also resounded in South Dakota's Senate race where Democrat Tom Daschle lost re-election by less than 5,000 votes to John Thune. Sioux Falls Bishop Robert Carlson told Daschle to stop identifying publicly as a Catholic because, using Ratzinger guidelines, "Catholics would be guilty of formal cooperation in evil, and so unworthy to present themselves for Holy Communion, if they were to deliberately vote for a candidate precisely because of the candidate's permissive stance on abortion or euthanasia."

Beyond his plan to label pro-choice Democrats as God's enemies, Ratzinger also elaborated a legal cover up. In May 2001, as ongoing revelations about kinky priests threatened to drown the Church's reputation, the Cardinal sent a secret letter, (obtained by The Observer) to every Catholic bishop. In it, Ratzinger "asserted the church's right to hold its inquiries behind closed doors and keep the evidence confidential for up to 10 years after the victims reached adulthood." Jamie Doward, Observer, April 24, 2005)

Lawyers for abuse victims claimed that Ratzinger "obstructed justice" by ordering that "the church's investigations into child sex abuse claims be carried out in secret." If the totality of sex crime allegations became public or fell into the hands of the police, the Church's reputation would suffer irreparable damage. So, Ratzinger's letter says, in cases where abuse had been "perpetrated with a minor by a cleric," the church should claim jurisdiction.

The German-born Cardinal wanted "preliminary investigations" into abuse claims to go to his office, not police or DAs. Then, he would refer those claims to private, Church-established courts in which the "functions of judge, promoter of justice, notary and legal representative can validly be performed for these cases only by priests" and would remain "subject to the pontifical secret."

Ratzinger also threatened to excommunicate priests who revealed details of the ongoing cases. The lawyers used this letter in a suit filed on behalf of two alleged abuse victims in Texas and against Ratzinger, alleging that he conspired to obstruct justice. On April 8 2004 the lawyers called Father John Beal, a Catholic University professor, to state under oath that the Ratzinger letter stated that the church had jurisdiction and control over sexual assault crimes.

Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, who co-signed Ratzinger's missile, had opined that he saw no reason that bishops should "contact the police in order to denounce a priest who has admitted the offense of pedophilia." (The Observer, April 24, 2005)

An additional cover up charge appeared in the Independent. According to Peter Popham, "Pope Benedict XVI has been accused of ignoring for seven years charges facing Fr Marcial Maciel, the founder of the Legionaries of Christ [an ultra conservative organization founded in Mexico in 1941] because Fr Maciel was a close friend of Pope John Paul II."

In 1997 Ratzinger led the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, set up by the Vatican to excommunicate sexually abusive priests. Popham reported that Bishop John R McCann of New York forwarded Ratzinger "detailed charges of sexual abuse made by Fr Juan Vaca, a priest in Bishop McCann's diocese."

In an open letter to Marcial, Vaca wrote that "Everything you did contradicts the beliefs of the Church and the order." Vaca cited "innumerable times" that Marciel would "wake me in the middle of the night abusing my innocence. Nights of fear, so many nights of absolute fear: so many nights of lost sleepplaced my own psychological health in jeopardy." (Independent, April 23, 2005)

Vaca and eight other former Legionaries of Christ accused Maciel of sexually abused them in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Cardinal Ratzinger took no action. He focused on the overriding issue of defeating the "dictatorship of relativism." The Church, he insisted, must use political power and manipulation to have its absolute "truth and values" prevail. (Sam Smith Progressive Review April 24)

"We are moving toward a dictatorship of relativism," Ratzinger warned in his last homily as Cardinal, "which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one's own ego and one's own desires." (CBC April 18, 2005)

For 2000 plus years, the Catholic Church has appealed to hundreds of millions around love and forgiveness while it also practiced intolerance and bigotry. In the 1960s, Popes John XXIII and Paul VI helped make the Church into the servant of the poor. For millions of Catholics, Liberation Theology renewed the beauty and spirit of their Church.

But Paul II and now Benedict XVI have sought to remove that "Marxist-based theology" from the Church and return it to darker periods of its history.

Saul Landau's newest book is THE BUSINESS OF AMERICA: HOW CONSUMERS HAVE RELACED CITIZENS AND HOW WE CAN REVERSE THE TREND. He is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University.