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Today's Stories June 16 / 17, 2007 Uri Avnery The Gaza Cage June 15, 2007 Alan Farago View from the Construction Crane: Sex, Taxes and Real Estate Scams in Miami Andy Worthington The Ordeal of Ali al--Marri Michael Simmons Terrorizing Artists in the USA Franklin Lamb Blowback Across Lebanon: The Failed Sunni Army Solution Gary Leupp The Day After We Attack Iran John Ross Ballot Burning Time in Ol' Mexico Website of the Day The American Rationalist   June 14, 2007 Michael Donnelly Charred SUVs and the End of Citizen Eco--Activism Faisal Kutty Scare Canada: The No--Fly List's False Sense of Security Harry Browne Ireland's Green Party Sells Out Charles Jonkel From the Arctic to Yellowstone: Bears in a World of Indifference Steven Higgs Murder in a Small Town: "Gay Panic" in Indiana? Bruce Dixon Black Power Through Low Power Radio Bruce K. Gagnon What Do We Do Now? A 10--Step Plan for Antiwar Activists Website of the Day Finkelgate June 13, 2007 Glen Ford Obama's Siren Song Marjorie Cohn Repression in Oaxaca Bill Christison A Grave Injustice at DePaul University Silvia Cattori "I Was Not Prepared for the Horrors I Saw": an Interview with Hedy Epstein Richard Gott Racism and TV in Venezuela Firmin DeBrabander How the Neocons Misread Machiavelli William S. Lind The Perfect (Sine) Wave: Bombing Railroad Stations in Iraq Keith Rosenthal Workers Score a Victory at Harvard Website of the Day GOP and Monty Python Explain: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" June 12, 2007 Jeffrey St. Clair How to Sell a War Paul Craig Roberts The Neocon Threat to American Freedom P. Sainath India's Plutocrats and the Press Ralph Nader The Biggest Scam in the World Omar Waraich A Black Day for Pakistan's Press Dave Lindorff Things Your Media Momma Didn't Tell You Harvey Wasserman Confessions of an Anti--Nuke Jerk Malini Johar Schueller It Takes a Bomb Ramzy Baroud War Foretold: Mark Twain and the Sins of Empire Website of the Day Palestinian Chronicle Needs Our Help!   June 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn The War on Journalists Paul Craig Roberts Losing the Economy to Mythology Uri Avnery 40 Bad Years: the Rot of Occupation Norman Solomon The Silence of the Bombs Eva Liddell Paris Hilton Doesn't Do Dishes: How Barbie Stood Up to Allen Ginsberg Rannie Amiri Groundhog Day in Pakistan Rachel Voss Poetry and Politics in Nassau County Christopher Brauchli A Wild West Tale, Starring Rev. Dobson and Bill O'Reilly D. K. Wilson Untangling Michael Vick from the Dogs Website of the Day Paris, Mixed Up June 9 / 10, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Dissidents Against Dogma George Ciccariello--Maher Behind Venezuela's "Student Rebellion": Who's Pulling the Strings? Saul Landau An Interview with Ricardo Alarcon, Vice President of Cuba Robert Fisk Believe It or Not in the Middle East Brian Cloughley Troop Support: Deceptions and Insipid Sentiments Ron Jacobs Condoleezza Rice Names the System Ward Boston Searching for the Truth About the USS Liberty Conn Hallinan Dark Plots in Byzantine Beirut Leonard Peltier The Ongoing War on Native American Religious Practices Lawrence Davidson Israel's New Anti--Boycott Task Force John Ross Mass Nude--In Complicates Church--State Scuffling in Mexico Kate Allan Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing Fred Gardner Ignorance Marches On Stephen Fleischman Little Boy, Fat Man and Iran Monica Benderman Reading Tom Paine in a Time of Crisis Geoff Bailey A Real Oil Conspiracy: Gouged at the Pump Missy Beattie Faith and War Patrick Dyer A Democrat Revs Up Ohio's Death Machine Tim Lengerich Dispelling the Cowboy Myth: an Interview with George Wuerthner James Irani and David Rahni Perspectives on the Arrests of Iran--Americans in Tehran Gary Leupp The Unfair Treatment of Paris Hilton Michael Tillery The Heart of a Sportswriter: an Interview with David Aldridge Michael Simmons Beating Off the Squares: the Hipness of Anton Rosenberg Poets' Basement Laymon, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend This is Sea Shepherd!   June 8, 2007 Serge Halimi What Sarkozy Learned About Politics from the US Patrick Cockburn The Turkish Incursion Jeffrey St. Clair Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty, Revisited   Paul Craig Roberts The Secret War William Blum What If NBC Cheered on a Military Coup Against Bush? Joshua Frank Swing--State Strategy: Looking for a Spoiler Lance Selfa How the Six Day War Changed the Middle East Dave Lindorff A "Criminal Conspiracy" in the White House Lawrence Ferlinghetti The Summer of Love: Flashbacks of a Human Be--In Website of the Day Robert Pollin: "Making the Federal Minimum Wage a Living Wage" June 7, 2007 Marjorie Cohn The Prison is the War Crime Soldz, Reisner and Olson: A Q & A on Psychologists and Torture Soldz, Reisner and Olson, et al: An Open Letter to Sharon Brehm, President of the American Psychological Association Paul Craig Roberts Losing Iraq, Nuking Iran Bill Quigley "How Long Must We Support a Mistake?" Silvia Cattori Sailing to Gaza Carl G. Estabrook What the June Bug Is: Politics in the Dismal Season Ellen Taylor Free the Tweakers!: The Good News About Meth Corporate Crime Reporter BAE Systems, Prince Bandar and the $2 Billion Account at the Riggs Bank Brenda Norrell Torture Training at Ft. Huachuca: Two Priests Face Prison for Exposing Torture in Arizona D. K. Wilson What Gary Sheffield Really Said Kevin Zeese Iraq Occupation Coming to a Head Over Oil Website of the Day How the Press Expired June 6, 2007 Alain Gresh Countdown to War on Iran Gary Leupp Poddy's Crazy Prayer: Bomb Iran, For Israel and America! Steven Sherman The Perils of Humanitarian Intervention Bruce Dixon Is Bill Gates Trying to Hijack Africa's Food Supply? Corporate Crime Reporter The Professor and the Nukes Brian M. Downing The Iraq War and Presidential Politics Ron Jacobs Luv n' Hate: a Different Take on the Summer of Love George Bisharat The Mirage of the Two State Solution Nicole Colson Over to You, Dante: Falwell's Ministry of Hate Bruce K. Gagnon From Italy to Guam: A Global Peace Movement is Taking Shape Website of the Day How the Democrats Should Treat Bush   June 5, 2007 Michael Neumann Canada in Afghanistan Jonathan Cook The Shin Bet and the Persecution of Azmi Bishara David Vest The Democrats' War Robert Fantina America's Cuba Policy Hoffman, Parsneau and Chowdhury CounterTerrorism as International Healthcare John V. Walsh Shaming the Official Antiwar Movement Richard Cretan Yellow Dog: The Strange Love of Martin Amis and Tony Blair Adam Engel Days of Dread: an American Tale William S. Lind The News from Anbar: Has Al Qaeda Over--Reached? Myles Hoenig Free the Oaks! Cut Down Those Yellow Ribbons! Jim Minick Lead--Foot Nation Website of the Day Punk Rock Soap Opera June 4, 2007 Nizar Latif An Interview with Moqtada al--Sadr Diana Johnstone Sarko and the Ghosts of May, 1968 Gregory Wilpert RCTV and Freedom of Speech in Venezuela Paul Watson The Anchorage Whale Killing Bureaucrats Summit Susan Rosenthal, MD How Cindy Sheehan Unmasked the Democrats Richard Ward The Right of Return to New Orleans Eva Liddell Don't Support the Troops Zahi Khouri Four Decades of Occupation Evelyn Pringle The FDA, GlaxoSmithKline and the Avandia Disaster China Hand About Those North Korean Benjamin Franklins ... Karyn Strickler George W. Bush: a "Ficeist" Leader Website of the Day The Guantanamo Files   June 2 / 3, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Last of the Texas Outsiders Marc Levy Iraq Dead Ahead: a Brief Military History and Civilian Guide to Arlington National Cemetery Martin Smith Camilo Mejía's War: From Foot Soldier for Empire to Rebel for Peace Diana Johnstone Great Power Meddling in Kosovo John Ross The Oaxaca Volcano Stews Uri Avnery On Generals and Admirals Sunsara Taylor This is Not a Story About Cindy Sheehan Richard Neville Were the Hippies Right? P. Sainath The Farm Crisis and 100,000 Indian Widows Missy Comley Beattie Let's Roar Nisrine Abiad and Victor Kattan The Hariri Tribunal: a Fait Accompli? Rannie Amiri Lebanon, Bush and the Three Stooges Margot Pepper Deconstructing "Return to Sender" Eric Stewart Censorship and Cop Brutality in the New Bison Wars Ralph Nader The Halberstam Camp Dan Bacher A Victory for the Fish Shaun Harkin and Sandy Boyer Irish War Protesters on Trial Richard Rhames Selling Five Acres in Crawford Frederick Hudson The Rediscovery of Ella Fitzgerald Poets' Basement Lindorff, Landau and Buknatski Website of the Weekend Gimme Shelter June 1, 2007 Dave Marsh The FBI and the Godfather (of Soul): James Brown's FBI Files Saul Landau Return to Cuba: 47 Years Later in Havana David Phinney How the Baghdad Embassy Was Built: Forced Labor and Worker Abuse Robert Jensen The Bigot and the Boycott Stanley Heller Arrest Robert McNamara Yifat Susskind Indigenous Women Fight Back Robert Weissman Corporate Power Since 1980 Paul Buchheit Africa and Its Discontents William S. Lind The Folly of Maximalist Objectives Sherwood Ross 78,000 Iraqis Have Been Killed by Coalition Airstrikes Stephen Lendman Terrorism Defined Website of the Day Desert Autonomous Zone

Weekend Edition June 16 / 17, 2007 Our Gang of Thugs The 1970s as a Context for Terrorist Violence By SAUL LANDAU EvAlthough Bush never would say so, the mid1970s serve as background for today’s “war on terrorism.” That’s the time his dad led the CIA and anti-Castro Cubans bombed and shot their way through the hemisphere. The leading star of the 1970s terrorist show, and still performing, was Luis Posada Carriles. Posada, currently leader of the fabled GAS (Geezers Assassination Society), enjoys his newly achieved freedom living in the Miami area. A federal judge dismissed charges against him by rightfully concluding that the U.S. government had played games with his case by charging him with minor immigration offenses and then purposely prolonging the legal processes so as to avoid confronting the nature of Posada’s crimes: blowing up a Cuban passenger plan in 1976, planning numerous assassination attempts over three decades and bombing Cuban tourist sites, which resulted in the death of an Italian tourist. Good reasons abound for Justice Department officials to feel reluctant to charge Posada with terrorism. As soon as they open the files, they discover the U.S. government had trained and encouraged him to practice terrorism as a vocation, had sworn repeatedly to use violence to overthrow the Castro government and was deeply involved in many of his and his close associates’ plots. The problem originated in early 1960, when President Eisenhower first formally agreed to initiate a covert operation to train and finance Cuban exiles to invade the island and overthrow the revolutionary government. When the invasion failed a year plus later, what should the new President do with these thousands of people? President Kennedy followed Eisenhower and kept some of the CIA Cubans busy with terrorist activities in the post Bay of Pigs era, a policy that inadvertently led to the Missile Crisis. Indeed, the intensity of attacks on Cuban personnel and property led Castro to offer concessions. In August 1961, he dispatched Che Guevara to Uruguay to hold a secret talk with Kennedy Latin America adviser Richard Goodwin. If Washington would call off the terrorist attacks and relax the embargo, Cuba would not push "any political alliance with the East." Che also implied that Cuba might “discuss the activities of the Cuban Revolution in other countriesâ€_ (exporting revolution). Che went further, indicating that Cuba would be willing to compensate expropriated U.S. companies. Che also emphasized that "we do not have, nor intend to have, any political or military alliance with anyone unless we are pressed toward it." The Cuban revolution is "irreversible," Goodwin understood from Che. By maintaining an outward veneer of defiance, Che clearly communicated that he was negotiating, not surrendering. Goodwin, and more importantly his boss, JFK, saw the concessions offer as signs of weakness. Kennedy turned up the heat, the terrorist attacks escalated. Castro gave the Soviets the green light to place intermediate range nuclear missiles on the island and by October 1962 the world trembled under the impending mushroom cloud. After Kennedy and Soviet Premier Khrushchev resolved peacefully the Missile Crisis, the issue of “what to do with all the rabid Cubans?â€_ became troublesome for successive U.S. presidents. The CIA reduced drastically the number of Cubans on its payroll and began to try to retract. Some Cubans took such policies as treason. In 1967, Orlando Bosch, who teamed up with Posada on the Cuban airliner job, showed his rebelliousness at U.S. government restrictions by firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter anchored in the Miami harbor. Paroled after serving a few years, Bosch tried to find other sponsors for violence against Cuba. He found the most compatible spot in Venezuela where his friend Orlando Garcia ran intelligence, DISIP, along with his number two Rafael Rivas Vazques. But even with openly violence-loving and Castro-hating allies in such positions, Bosch pushed the terrorist envelope over the edge. In 1973, he plotted to assassinate Henry Kissinger for signing an anti-hijacking treaty with Cuba and staged two bombings, while offering $3 million to the person who would assassinate Castro. He had not only violated the terms of his parole, he had made the U.S. government very uncomfortable. This translated into his old confreres having to arrest him, albeit apologetically. Venezuela asked the United States to allow him back. Washington said no and Bosch went to Chile, where he expected General Pinochet to throw down a red carpet for him. In March 1976, Bosch tried and botched a contract for Pinochet: to assassinate exiled Chilean left leader Andres Pascal Allende, the nephew of Salvador and his companion Mary Anne Beausire. Bosch then initiated an umbrella organization of terrorists who gathered in June 1976 in Bonao, the Dominican Republic, assembling murderers of different types, all of whom pledged to assassinate Castro. He called the new group the Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Apparently, the gang of hoodlums all agreed that murderous action would bring down Castro -- although the absence of an articulate theoretician was painfully obvious. “Those guys were thugs,” a former FBI Special Agent told me. “I knew them all, interrogated them. They were criminals hiding behind some flimsy ideological screen. Bosch was a mad man. The others weren’t much saner.” A former Miami police officer said years ago that the “The Cubans held the CORU meeting at the request of the CIA.” They were “running amok in the mid-1970s, and the United States had lost control of them. So the United States backed the meeting to get them all going in the same direction again, under United States control. The basic signal was “Go ahead and do what you want, outside the United States’.” (Assassination on Embassy Row, p. 251) After the Bonao meeting concluded in mid June, a series of violent anti-Cuban acts occurred, for which CORU members claimed credit. On July 9, a bomb exploded in the baggage cart that was in the process of loading onto a Cubana airliner. Had the plane left on time, the luggage would have exploded in mid air. On July 14, the British West Indian Airlines office in Barbados got bombed (they had started flights to Cuba) as did a car owned by a Cuban official in Barbados. Three days later, machine gunners opened fire at the Cuban Embassy in Bogota. Air Panama offices got hit in that city as well, presumably because they handled Cubana Airlines business in Colombia. On July 22, kidnappers in Merida, Mexico, tried unsuccessfully to grab the Cuban consul. They did, however, kill a Cuban fisherman in the attempt. On July 24, three anti-Castro Cubans got busted trying to place a bomb at the New York City Academy of Music, where an event celebrating Cuba was taking place. On August 9, CORU claimed credit for kidnapping and murdering two Cuban diplomats with Argentine secret police help. In August and September, CORU members bombed Cuban targets twice in Panama. In Trinidad-Tobago, bombers hit the Guyanese Embassy, presumably for Guyana allowing Cuban aircraft to refuel on route to Angola. The violence escalated when Omega 7 (a name used by the ultra right Cuban Nationalist Movement) bombed a Soviet ship anchored in New Jersey and five days later assassinated Orlando Letelier in a car bombing in Washington, D.C., killing his IPS colleague Ronni Karpen Moffitt as well. The orders to kill Letelier came from the Chilean government, but the assassins hired by Chile’s secret police sprang from the same pool of crows that had met in Bonao. These crows -- Bosch and Posada -- then hit the Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados on October 6, killing 73 passengers and crew members. For those spooks that still retained memory, the old Spanish refrain should have echoed loudly. “Train crows and they return to peck your eyes out.” Posada has joined his old comrade in bombs Orlando Bosch, who apparently enjoys his dotage in Miami where he still boasts to reporters that he ships explosives to Cuba. These violent exiles used their intolerance for U.S."policy changes" toward Cuba to become literally loose cannons. An investigator would find the bloody trail of these men and their acts traced back to a decision made in the Oval Office. Eisenhower condoned violence. Kennedy escalated. President Lyndon B. Johnson placed a tempering hand. But Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger re-opened Pandora’s Box of terrorists. This ugly container of death merchants emerged from the initial illegal policy designed to destroy the Cuban revolutionary government through violence and economic strangulation. Once created and trained, the crows returned -- and continue to do so -- to peck out the eyes of those who cultivated them. President Bush now has his “Posada problem.” He said after the 9/11 attacks: “He who harbors a terrorist is as guilty as the terrorist.” It’s lucky we have a president for whom words are meaningless! Maybe some aspiring candidates for the presidency will reflect on recent “ terrorist history” and reject “covert” means to achieve policy ends. The world already has more than enough crows. Saul Landau’s new Counterpunch Press book is A BUSH AND BOTOX WORLD. His new film WE DON’T PLAY GOLF HERE is available on DVD: roundworldproductions@gmail.com

New From CounterPunch Books The Secret Language of the Crossroads: HOW THE IRISH INVENTED SLANG By Daniel Cassidy   Now Available! How the Press Failed The Gang's All Here: Judy Miller, Bob Woodward, Jeffrey Goldberg, Rupert Murdoch, Bill O'Reilly...End Times Leaves No Reputation Unstained! Buy End Times Now! Now Available from CounterPunch Books! Saul Landau's Bush and Botox World with a Foreword by Gore Vidal Click Here to Order! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Order Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair