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Now Available! Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY Click Here to Order the Hot New CounterPunch Book by 3-time Nobel Peace Prize Nominee Kathy Kelly! Today's Stories July 5, 2005 Elaine Cassel Why This Progressive Will Miss Sandra Day O'Connor July 2 / 4, 2005 Alexander Cockburn "Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi? Lenni Brenner Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July Laura Carlsen Zapatista's Red Alert James Petras The Pretensions of Neoliberalism: Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment William A. Cook Kings of Serpents Brian Cloughley Quagmire of the Vanities Saul Landau The Mass Media, Symbols and Ownership Tom Crumpacker Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles? Greg Moses Dylan's America Dr. Susan Block My Adelphia Story: a Tale of Censorship, Fraud, Christian Family Values and Really Lousy Cable Service Fran Shor Disassembling Bush's Iraq War: Liberated into a No Man's Land Fred Gardner Study: Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer Moshe Adler The New London Case: Corporate Giveaways That Destroy Communities, But Don't Create Jobs David Model The Downing Street Memo: So What's New? Seth Sandronsky California Spying, Schwarzenegger-Style Ramzy Baroud Managed Democracy in the Middle East Suzan Mazur Frank Carlucci the First: the "Sublime Prince" of Scranton Ben Tripp Voltaire, I Can Dig Your Rap Justin Taylor Faux Biography and the Pleasures of "Lint" Brendan Bailey Mesh Caps, Vice Magazine and the Trouble with Irony Poets' Basement Albert, Engel and Louise Website of the Weekend Radical Reference   July 1, 2005 Christopher Brauchli With Friends Like These: Bush Buddies Karimov and Musharraf Pat Williams What Real Westerners Think About Bush's Pseudo-Cowboy Palaver Gary Leupp Summer Surprise? John Stauber Mad Cow in America: the USDA Continues to Lie John Chuckman The Blessings of Canada Justicia y Paz Colombia's Disappeared: Their Names, At Least! Cockburn / St. Clair It's Put Up or Shut Up for Bush and the Dems on the Supreme Court   June 30, 2005 Kathy Kelly An Open Letter to Carl Levin: Compassion for Iraqis John Stauber Oprah Not the "Only" Mad Cow in America Virginia Rodino All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Unity in the Anti-War Movement Jason Leopold Meet the New Chair of the FERC: James Kelliher, the Man Who Invited Enron to Write Bush's Energy Policy Dave Lindorff What Was Bush Thinking? Greg Moses Racism at Cape Cod Norman Solomon Memo to the Iraq War Joshua Frank Israel's Theocrats Alexander Cockburn The Political Function of PBS   June 29, 2005 Mike Schaefer How the Washington Post Lied About Its Own War Poll Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor Bush's Big Democratic Hoax in Iraq Sharon Smith Democrats Shift into Reverse Sam Husseini A Quick Way to End the Insurgency John Stauber Put a Photo of Mad Cow #2 on a Milk Carton Ahmad Faruqui Is Militarism Irreversible in Pakistan? Linda S. Heard Bush's Speech: the View from Cairo Stew Albert Chet Helms: a Rock and Roll Hero Ray McGovern Bush at Ft. Bragg: Stay the Crooked Course June 28, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts A Defeat Bred in Deceit Landau / Hassen Bush's Meddling in Internal Syrian Politics John A. Murphy Keeping Nader Off the Ballot: an Analysis of Political Profiling in Pennsylvania Mike Whitney More Lies from Rumsfeld: Those "Meetings" with Insurgents CounterPunch News Service JFK on Staying in Vietnam: Is Bush Reading from Kennedy's Playbook? Dave Zirin Pining for the Pistons Dave Lindorff Showtime in Washington Patrick Cockburn Iraq: a Bloody Mess   June 27, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Blood Sacrifices for Empty Slogans Mike Marqusee G8: Who are the Hijackers? Mark Scaramella When a Corporate Raider Claims Economic Hardship: the Court-Approved Lies of Charles Hurwitz Leigh Saavedra Press Apologists for Torture Kathy Kelly Where is the UN? June 25 / 26, 2005 Alexander Cockburn The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals Jennifer Van Bergen America's Parallel Legal Systems George Corsetti This Land is Their Land: Condemnation for Corporations Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer Let's Open the Gulag: a People's Mission to Gitmo Kevin Zeese Counter-Recruitment: How to Keep the Military From Getting their Hands on Your Kids P. Sainath Russian Roulette in Vidharbha John Stauber How to Bury a Mad Cow Scott Handleman Gay in the Third World Tom Barry The Politics & Ideologies of the Anti-Immigrationists John Walsh Looking for Peace in All the Wrong Places Justin E.H. Smith The Hairless Apes of Kansas vs. the Reality-Based Community: Why Progressives Have a Stake in the War on Evolution Alan Wallis The Story of Pinky: the Drug Trade in My Neighborhood Ben Tripp Negative Space: an Artful Lesson Frederick B. Hudson Songs to Lose Your Loneliness By: the Raised Voices of Sweet Honey in the Rock Poets' Basement Gaffney, Engel, Davies, and Albert   June 24, 2005 Ray McGovern The Downing St. Fixation: Fixing to Fix "Fixed" Jorge Mariscal "They Only Call Us Americans When They Need Us for War": the Paradox of Mexican Americans in Iraq Desiree Hellegers Portland vs. the FBI Zeynep Toufe What Do the American People Know and When Did They Know It? Joshua Frank Call Him Senator Con Job David Lindorff Which Flag Would Jesus Burn? Michael Neumann Victory and Recruitment Website of the Day Gagging Dr. Dean   June 23, 2005 Christopher Brauchli Thomas Griffith and Rule 49: He Practiced Law Without a License; Now He's a Federal Appeals Court Judge Clay Conrad Killing Off the Jury with Tort Reform Standard Schaefer A Retort to Military Neo-Liberalism P. Sainath Vidharbha: No rains and 116F, But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks Mark Engler CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death Norman Solomon Voluntary Amnesia in America Cockburn / St. Clair Frank Calzon Kathy Kelly Where You Stand Determines What You See     June 22, 2005 Kevin Zeese The Bush Administration's Psy-Ops on the American Public: an Interview with Col. Sam Gardiner William S. Lind Afghanistan: the Other War Arsalan Iftikhar Patriots Against the PATRIOT Act Dan Nagengast Give Populism a Chance: From France to Kansas David Krieger To the Graduates: We Live in an Interdependent World Kathleen & Bill Christison Tempest in Santa Fe: Confronting Israeli Myth-making     June 21, 2005 Brian Cloughley Destroy the Unbelievers! Mike Whitney President Disconnect Dave Lindorff Who Needs Big Bird, Anyway? Mark Weisbrot Bush's Lonely Campaign Against Hugo Chavez Matthew R. Simmons The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis Dave Zirin The Crass Slipper Fits: Ron Howard's Terrible "Cinderella Man" Virginia Rodino The Anti-War Movement and Impeachment Paul Craig Roberts A War Waged by Liars and Morons   June 20, 2005 Alan Maass The GM Job Massacre Tariq Ali To the Gates of the Gleneagles Hotel! Mickey Z. WMDs American-Style: It's 60 Years Since Alamogordo William Blum Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends Gary Leupp Old News Indeed: In 1999, Bush Craved Chance to Attack Iraq Jason Leopold Someone Tell Bush Iraq Wasn't Behind 9/11, Before He Starts Another War Dave Lindorff Why the Media Should be Schiavo'd Alan Maass The GM Job Massacre Uri Avnery Condi and Hamas Website of the Day Crimes Against Poetry   June 18 / 19, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Is the Jury Dead? Greg Moses Race Bias and the Death Penalty, One More Time Benjamin Shepard Arrested for Stickering, Biking and Other Misadventures: Creative Direct Action in the Era of the PATRIOT Act Stan Goff Stuff to Do to Stop the War: 95 Days to Pre-Nixonize George W. Bush Lee Sustar Does Iraq's Main Labor Union Support the Occupation? Jude Wanniski The Tipping Point: Getting Out of Iraq Diana Barahona Librarians as Spooks: the Scheme to Infiltrate Cuba Via Libraries Brian Concannon, Jr. Justice Dodge in Haiti, Again: Impunity and the Raboteau Massacre Fred Gardner How Many Wins Can We Take? Mike Whitney Gen. Tommy Friedman's Plan to "Win" the War in Iraq: Reinstate the Draft Ahmad Faruqui Star Wars or Earth Wars? Manuel García, Jr. De-Eichmannizing America Roger Howard Leave Iranian Politics to Iranians Ron Jacobs Eros and the Grateful Dead Ben Tripp Situation Desperate: Why Am I Not Pleased? Poets' Basement Louise, Albert and Engel Website of the Weekend Christ's Entry into Washington     June 17, 2005 Ricardo Alarcón Who Helped Posada Enter the US? Clay Conrad Medical Marijuana: Is Jury Nullification the Next Step? Marc Estrin Open-Ended Closure: the Death Penalty and the Culture of Victimhood Colin Brown Firebombing Fallujah: Pentagon Lied About Use of Napalm in Iraq Christopher Brauchli Pennies for Africa: Bush's Phony Money Joshua Frank Blue State Warriors: How Democrats Derailed the Peace Movement Norman Solomon The Killing Street Memo Mary Rizzo Who's Afraid of Gilad Atzmon? Bond / Brutus / Setshedi How Bono and Trojan Horse NGOs Sabotage the Struggle Against Neoliberalism   June 16, 2005 John Walsh The Iraq War Polls: Dems' Stance Even Less Popular Than Bush's Dave Lindorff Work 'Till You Die: the Bush Retirement Plan Adrian Lomax Torture in U.S. Prisons: Common, Lethal, Unreported Tom Crumpacker The CIA, Posada and the Bombing of Cubana Flight 455 Jeffrey Kolakowski The Kinsley Paradigm: Downsizing the Downing St. Memo Julene Bair Turning Off the Ogallala Spigot: Toward a New Way to Farm on the Great Plains Michael Dickinson As We Forgive Our Debtors: the Madness of Money Francois Houtart / Isabel Parra, et al. Against Terrorism; In Defense of Humanity: an Appeal Tom Barry Meet Bolton's Replacement: Robert "First Strike" Joseph     June 15, 2005 Stan Goff An Open Letter to US Troops on Loyalty Daniel Wolff The Palace at 4 A.M. Tim Wise Discover the Nutwork: David Horowitz and the Politics of Ad Hominem Distortion Ricardo Alarcón The New CIA Revelations About Posada Joshua Frank House Republicans vs. Bush: "This is Not a Conservative War" John Hilary Bloodsuckers' Summit: Why the Left Should Rendezvous at the G8 Norman Solomon Iran's Reformers: a Threat to Theocrats and Neocons Alexander Cockburn / Jeffrey St. Clair Juries and Lynch Mobs Website of the Day What It Feels Like to be Tasered (Turn Up the Volume)     June 14, 2005 Paul Craig Roberts Enabling Evil: Bush's Willing Executioners Forrest Hylton Stalemate in Bolivia Richard Gott The Crisis in Bolivia Fred Gardner The Raich Decision: All Power to the Feds Steve Breyman Doing the Right Thing is Also Politically Expedient Dave Zirin Sacred Hoops: Basketball in the Barrio Robert Kent Outsourcing Torture and the Stop-Loss Program Paul Craig Roberts Enabling Evil: Bush's Willing Executioners   June 13, 2005 Gary Leupp Another Damning Document Dave Lindorff The Inca and Us John Stauber Mad Cow USA: the Cover-Up Begins to Unravel Fred Gardner Supreme Indignity: Medical Pot Doctors Respond to Justice Stevens Evelyn J. Pringle TeenScreen: the Lawsuits Begin Norman Solomon Letter From Tehran Winslow T. Wheeler Neo-Con Unfurls the Big Picture   June 10 / 12, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Thomas Friedman's Imaginary World Sharon Smith Torturers and Liars: Masters of Deception Brian Cloughley "Support Our Torturers!" Chris Kromm Home Cookin': Pentagon's Base Relignment Plan Would Increase South's Share Heather Gray A Day in Mississippi: Some Things Have Changed; Some Remain the Same Kevin Zeese What the Left Must Learn from 2004: an Interview with Josh Frank Mickey Z. The Pentagon Papers, 34 Years Later Gary Leupp A Review of Sison's "At Home in the World" Eli Stephens The Asshole in El Paso: Why Posada Carriles Matters Nick Dearden A Scottish Band in the Occupied Territories Oscar Olivera Recovering Bolivia's Oil and Gas Robert Fisk Screening "Kingdom of Heaven" in Beirut Michael Dickinson Oh My God!: Gunning for Blasphemers Poets' Basement Engel, Albert, Louise, Ford Website of the Weekend Gravity's Rainbow, Illustrated   June 9, 2005 Len Colodny Felt Was Asked Under Oath in 1975 If He Was "Deep Throat" Christopher Brauchli From Baseballs to Hand Grenades Ron Jacobs Light a Candle; Curse the Darkness Dave Lindorff US Media Shamed by Brit Journalist Katrina Yeaw / Alex Schmaus Repression 101: Anti-War Students Sanctioned at SFSU Alan Farago Spin Machine Busts a Gasket in the Everglades: Fed Judge Whacks Jeb Saul Landau The Charmed Life of a Mass Murderer   June 8, 2005 Jim Hougan Strange Bedfellows Deep Throat, Bob Woodward and the CIA Alan Maass Is Bolivia on the Edge of Revolution? an Interview with Tom Lewis Jason Leopold Enron Lives!: Former Army Sec. White Wants Govt. Money for New Energy Scam Niranjan Ramakrishnan Exit Right, Advani: Unpardonable Acts of Statesmanship Dave Zirin The Rotting Soul of the 49ers Derrick O'Keefe Bush's Terrorist: the Case of Posada Carriles Diana Johnstone Non, Neen, Angelene! Why Defenders of the "Oui" are Wrong Website of the Day The Meatrix   June 7, 2005 Forrest Hylton Bolivia's Agony of the Stalement Continues Greg Moses / Susan van Haitsma Pushing Back the Violence Lenni Brenner What Madison Would Think About the Air Force Academy's Offical Fanatics Col. 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July 5, 2005 An Interview with Robert Jensen The Right's Assault on the Academy By BOB LIBAL A version of the following interview with Robert Jensen, journalism professor at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Heart of Whiteness and Citizens of the Empire, originally appeared in the June 2005 Issue, an independent progressive magazine published in Austin, TX. BL: David Horowitz was on the University of Texas campus a few weeks ago promoting his bill of academic rights and his version of free speech. I was wondering if you could comment on efforts to promote these academic "bills of rights" and what the effect could be on the academy. RJ: Actually if you took the principles in that bill of rights and applied them uniformly across the campus, it would probably be very beneficial to the institution. It would be healthy to ask, "Are there orthodoxies in place that are routinely not challenged by the curriculum and the faculty? Are there orthodoxies in place that students are punished for trying to challenge?" If you took that question seriously, the first place that you would look is the business school. You'd look at the places where basically a centrist to right orthodoxy is in place. The most grotesque example is the business school where corporate capitalism is taught as if it were the only way to organize an economy. It's a massive propaganda campaign. What's going on today is the targeting of faculty with certain points of view to try to create a climate of fear that will turn the university into nothing but an ideological factory, which it almost already is. That's what this is all about. It is a political intervention; there are no principles involved. BL: Do you think efforts by Horowitz and others who have formed the "Discover the Network" online database covering the left, are in a similar vein? For instance that network describes you and other progressive and radical academics and activists as "anti-American leftists" and "totalitarian radicals." RJ: [Discover the Network] is a political project. One has to analyze what is the project and what is the source of the potential coercion of the project. And, [the left] has to be a little more precise in this. For instance, I think calling this McCarthyism is inaccurate, for several reasons. First of all, to label the second red scare of the 20th century "McCarthyism" is to demonize one individual. There was a consistent attack on the left from the late 40s through the 60s that wasn't perpetrated just by Joe McCarthy. Harry Truman and Democrats also participated in it. So, I avoid the term McCarthyism. Second, that attack on the left in the 1940s and 1950s involved the imposition of government power directly through various agencies of the state -- House committee hearings, FBI involvement, criminal prosecutions, and such things -- which put direct pressure on universities and the entertainment industry to fire and blacklist people. That's state power. David Horowitz is not petitioning anyone in the government to directly suppress the speech. He's smart to not call for faculty to be fired; he knows that that won't play in the U.S. at this point with a large enough public to make it politically effective. So it's not McCarthyism in that sense. It's not intended to bring state power down on anyone. It's a political intervention, not a legal one. And he has a right to do it. And, of course, I have a right to say the Discover the Network website and the argument implicit in it is literally incoherent and laughable. It has no principled or logical application of terms; it's just ridiculous. The appropriate response is to answer it and explain why it's silly to have a chart of the left that links Katie Couric and Mohammed Atta. Here's what I think is at the core of this: At a time when conservative political forces control the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the government, the right-wingers are trying to neutralize two institutions where there is some minimal commitment to free and open inquiry -- the media and university system. They're trying to shut those down. It's a logic of total control that is so common in political movements that have an authoritarian bent like the reactionary right has. But they also know there is a deeper commitment to free speech and academic freedom in the culture today than there was in 1950. Those concepts have deepened and enriched American society, so that even among ordinary people who 50 years ago would have been happy to hang communists, there is an appreciation of the importance of these concepts. So, [the right] is approaching them in a way that is different than in the 19-teens or 1950s, but with the same goal -- to shut down any space for free and open inquiry that could lead to critique of dominant institutions. BL: There's a political movement to instill a climate of fear amongst radical or progressive faculty RJ: Or even liberal faculty at this point. We should remember that part of the reason that Horowitz's argument is attractive to people is that there is a kernel of truth to it. The university is, in terms of the political spectrum today in the United States, disproportionately liberal -- not radical, but liberal in a certain limited sense. If you look at things like support for gay rights, abortion rights, support for the Democratic Party -- markers of a tepid liberalism -- most any state university is likely to have a faculty that is more liberal than the general population. So, we should acknowledge that compared to lots of other institutions in society, the media and universities are disproportionately liberal in certain ways. But they are also centrist and reactionary in very important ways, in how they support the basic distribution of power and resources in the society. BL: That's what you see in things like the business school being institutions that support the status quo. But, you would never see someone like Horowitz saying we need to be hiring more left-leaning economists. RJ: That's the lie of the whole project -- this whole notion of balance. Horowitz and others are not really interested in balance across the whole curriculum. Also, balance is a useless term in academics, when you're talking about intellectual life. You can't balance all positions. Some positions have been presumptively excluded from the conversation because of the weight of the evidence and development of theory in a field. For example, you don't let flat earth people teach geography, you don't let people who believe in the earth-centered solar system teach astrophysics. There is a process by which knowledge goes forward. BL: It seems that there is shift from this "culture of fear" towards actual legislation that has been proposed to rein in Middle Eastern Studies departments to make them more "balanced." RJ: Area studies programs in general were set up to serve U.S. hegemony, to train people to go run the world. But some of those programs shifted to become places of critical inquiry, and the dominant institutions don't like that. People with power don't like that something they set up to support the dominant interpretation of the world has become now a site of struggle. It's not that [these professors] shouldn't be scrutinized. Everybody should be scrutinized. But, if you're going to evaluate every word that Joseph Massad (Columbia University professor who has come under fire for his defense of the Palestinian right to return) ever said in a classroom, send someone over to the business school, and evaluate everything they say. And what will you find? You'll find a much more horrendous ideological conformity. But that's not of interest to people. So Middle Eastern Studies become the focus of scrutiny, and they become the warning to everybody else in area studies to shut up and sit down, or you'll lose your funding, you'll lose your professors. So it's all about a demonstration effect. That's what the attack on Ward Churchill (the radical University of Colorado professor who has been investigated by the university for a post-9/11 article) is about. That's what Joseph Massad is about. You don't need to bust everybody; you just need to scare them. It's the same principle that an authoritarian government might apply to a resistance movement: You don't have to kill them all, you just have to hang a few of them every now and then when you find them, and hang them up from the lamppost to make sure everyone knows what is happening. That's what is going on. BL: Could you speak on how you feel the academy should respond to these political creations of climates of fear? RJ: Well, I think university administrations should reject an ad hoc examination of one program or one professor. And if they're going to engage in this there should be some systematic process under faculty control. This ad hoc style of investigation is ludicrous. It's a response to political pressure. If there is a problem and the problem is systematic, then it should be dealt with systematically. Administrators should rigorously defend the concept of academic freedom, not just for self-interested reasons, but by articulating the value of it to the whole society. If there are claims that classrooms are inappropriately politicized, then we should evaluate what type of problems there are, and if there is a problem we should go about trying to solve it a way that is grounded in academic freedom and due process. Bob Libal is a student/youth organizer for Grassroots Leadership's Not With Our Money! campaign. He can be reached at bob@notwithourmoney.org. Robert Jensen is a professor of journalism at the University of Texas at Austin and author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting Race, Racism and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu.