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Today's
Stories
October 16
/ 17, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Free Speech Movement and Howard Stern
October 15,
2004
Paul Craig
Roberts
Where
Did These "Conservatives" Come From?: The Brownshirting
of America
Laura Carlsen
Wal-Mart
vs. the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon
Greg Bates
Empire of Insanity: Kerry's Iraq Troop Numbers
Michael Donnelly
News from a Swing State: Does Anyone Here Have a Spine?
Katherine Lahey
The Venezuelan "Threat": Why Do Kerry and Bush Fear
Hugo Chavez?
Robert Jensen
/ Pat Youngblood
Election Day Fears
Leah Caldwell
From
Supermax to Abu Ghraib: the Masterminds of Torture and Abuse
Website of
the Day
An Anti-Billionaire Policy? Why That Would Be Economic Racism
October 14,
2004
Darcy Richardson
The
Other Progressive Candidate: the Lonely Crusade of Walt Brown
Willliam A.
Cook
Turning
Myths into Truth
Laura Santina
Water, Women and War
Evelyn Pringle
Free Speech Banned by Big Pharma: What You Can't Say About Drug
Importation
Alan Farago
Lessons
from Nature
Rep. Maxine Waters
A Letter to Colin Powell on Haiti
Nicole Colson
Maimed
for Oil and Empire
October 13,
2004
Bishop Thomas
Gumbleton and Bill Quigley
Aftermath
of a Coup: The Other Disaster in Haiti
Sharon Smith
Barak
O-Bomb-a?: Democrats Target Iran
Christopher Brauchli
God and the Bush Administration
Mike Whitney
The Real Meaning of the Hamdi Case
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: a False Beacon?
Website of
the Day
Operation
Truth
October 12,
2004
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
"Indian
Country"
Greg Bates
The Year of Voting Dangerously: a Survey Request of Nader Voters
in Swing States
Steven Conn
Progressives as Pawns: Kerry's War on Nader
Jason Leopold
Under Cheney, Halliburton Helped Saddam Siphon Billions from
UN Oil-for-Food Program
Security Scholars
for a Sensible Foreign Policy
Time for a Change of Course
Timothy J. Freeman
Dying for a Mistake
Pierre Tristam
Deconstructing Bush
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The 2nd Debate: the Blurring of Act and Audience
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Israel as Sideshow
Website of the Day
John Kerry's Personal Off-Shore Tax Shelters
October 11,
2004
Robert Fisk
Iraq:
Unforgivable Betrayals and Broken Promises
Kevin Pina
The
Untold Story of Aristide's Departure from Haiti
Patrick Gavin
Rethinking
Columbus Day
Chris Floyd
Tribes with Flags in the New Afghanistan
Daniel Wolff
Radioactive Money: Entergy, Political Cash and America's Most
Dangerous Nuclear Plant
Walter Brasch
The Only Ones Who Believe Saddam Had WMDs are Bush, Cheney...and
40% of All Americans
Mike Whitney
The Phony Afghan Elections: Ballot of the Disappearing Ink
Ari Shavit
"He Talks to Condi Rice Every Day": an Interview with
Sharon's Lawyer
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Debates and the Big Lie
Website of the Day
Dylan's Greatest Recording?
October 9 /
10, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
"There
Are No Innocents"
Paul de Rooij
Northern Ireland is Still the Issue: a Conversation with Gerry
Adams
M. Shahid Alam
Making Sense of Our Times
Laura Carlsen
Protest and Populism in Latin America
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: ASA Goes to Court
Col. Dan Smith
Bush's Credibility Gap
Paul Craig
Roberts
Faith-Based Economics
Greg Bates
What If Nader Critics Get What They Demand?
Joshua Frank
Cobb, the Greens and the Collapse of the Left
Felice Pace
Wilderness, Politics and the Oligarchy: How the Pew Charitable
Trust is Smothering the Grassroots Environmental Movement
Walter A. Davis
Of Pynchon, Thanatos and Depleted Uranium
William A.
Cook
The Agony of Colin Powell
Phyllis Pollack
Twas No Crank Call Love Affair: London Calling, 25 Years Later
Poets' Basement
Klipschutz, Albert, Ford
Website of the Weekend
Abu Ghraib: the Taguba Annexes
October 8,
2004
Jennifer Loewenstein
The
Israeli Invasion of Gaza
Moshe Adler
Edwards' Gambit: He Hoped No One Would Notice the Similarities
David Swanson
Media Blackout: Press Continues to Ignore Labor's Opposition
to Iraq War
Dave Zirin
CounterPunch Contest: Let's Name the New DC Baseball Team!
Rep. Ron Paul
The Draft is a Form of Slavery
William S. Lind
Keeping Our SA Up
Samar Assad
Kerry v. Bush: No Difference When It Comes to Israel / Palestine
Jim Ingalls
and Sonali Kolhatkar
The Elections in Afghanistan
October 7,
2004
Dave Lindorff
All
Out of Volunteers: A Draft is in the Air
Masha Hamilton
Fear in Kandahar
Christopher
Brauchli
Master of Corruption: the Ripening Scandals of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Is There Still Time to Impeach Bush?
Bruce K. Gagnon
Bombing the Panhandle: Fighting the Pentagon in Rural Florida
Meredith Kolodner
Where
is the Urgency?: The Anti-War Movement's Election Year Challenge
October 6,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
"Please,
Dude, Can I Take Them Out?": Targeting Civilians in Fallujah
Ron Jacobs
Going
Nuclear: the Ghost of Edward Teller Lives
Michael Colby
The National Flip-Flop: Suddenly Bush is Unfit to Lead?
Tarif Abboushi
More of the Same: Israel Wins the Debates
Matthew Behrens
Canadian Firms Profit from Iraqi Blood
Mike Whitney
Rethinking WMDs
John Pilger
Stealing Diego Garcia
Ben Tripp
Kerry's "Triumph"
Kevin McKiernan
Cheney's Poison Lab: Wrong Time, Wrong Target
Patrick Cockburn
Elections
Will Not End the Fighting in Iraq
Website of the Day
Is There an Islamic Problem?
October 5,
2004
Anthony Loewenstein
Rupert
Murdoch and the Marginals: "Personally Creating Outcomes"
Mark Clinton
and Tony Udell
The
Suicide of an Iraq War Veteran
Greg Bates
Trading
Idiots: an Open Letter to Eric Alterman
Dave Lindorff
What's
the Frequency, Karl?
Norm Dixon
Why Washington Won't Save Darfur Villagers
Larry Kearney
God Talk and Burning Children
Bill Linville
Dirty Politics in the Land of "Clean" Government
Gary Leupp
What
Edwards Should Ask Cheney
Website of
the Day
A Guide to Halliburton for Tonight's Debate
October 4,
2004
Diane Christian
The
Gates of Hell
Joshua Frank
An Interview with David Cobb
Doug Giebel
Incurious George: What If Bush Didn't Lie?
John Chuckman
Strange Victory: Sen. Obvious and the Pathetic Lump
Ramzy Baroud
Reverse the Picture: Anatomy of a Palestinian Outrage
Julia Stein
Remembering Mario Savio and the FSM
Sean Donahue
Outsourcing
Terror: Kerry and Special Forces
Website of
the Day
Mapping
Mt. St. Helens as She Rocks
October 2 /
3. 2004
Paul Wright
John
Kerry on Criminal Justice
Kathleen and Bill Christison
An Exchange with Israeli Historian Bennie Morris
Kathie Helmkamp
My Son Trent: a Marine Who Doesn't Want to Kill
Phillip Cryan
Indigenous Mobilization in Colombia
Lenni Brenner
The First Ex-Catholic Saint: Memories of Mario Savio
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: In Case You Missed "Montel"
Ron Jacobs
It Did Happen Here: When Neo-Nazis Terrorized Olympia
Ben Tripp
Sticker Shock
William S.
Lind
The Grand Illusion: Iraqi Security Forces
Dave Zirin
The Swindle of the Century: Baseball Comes to DC
Dave Lindorff
Lies from the Great Debate
Luscon Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Elections: a High-Tech Sham is Underway
Zoe Moskovitz
& Sasha Kramer
Separating Lies from Truth About Haiti
Nelson P. Valdes
Habana Night vs. Latin American Scholars in Vegas: 61 Banned
Cuban Academics
Alan Farago
The "Ownership Society" and the End of the Everglades
Nancy Haley
What is the Historical Jesus Trying to Tell Us?
Alex Billet
Long Live The Clash: London Still Calling After 25 Years
Steve Fesenmaier
Save and Burn: The War on Libraries
Poets' Basement
Smith, Holt, Albert
October 1,
2004
Steve Breyman
Kerry's
Missed Opportunities
Rose Gentle
My
Son Died for a Lie
Lee Sustar
Iran
in the Crosshairs
Ralph Nader
What
We Didn't Hear at the Debate: Where's the Exit Strategy?
Walter Andrews
We Are Less Secure Now Than Ever
Mike Whitney
Pandora's
Government
Mickey Z.
Debate
This
Saul Landau
The
Iraq Invasion: Lessons from the Pinochet Cases
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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Weekend Edition
October 16 / 17, 2004
Judging Judges
A
Few Pages from The Mirror of Justices (c. 1290)
By
PETER LINEBAUGH
With the Supreme Court nicely toying
once again about who is to live and who is to die as it considers
the death penalty for juveniles and as the American casualties
in Iraq yesterday included three teenagers, it is well past the
time to chop legal logic, or merely vote for the dime's worth
of difference between Bush-Kerry troop levels.
Turning a forgotten page from
the annals of time, let us review a selection from the thirteenth
century London fishmonger, Andrew Horn, whose underground classic,
The Mirror of Justices, was not printed until 1642 nor
translated until 1646, those revolutionary years preceding the
beheading of the sovereign.
Though written in French, the
language of the feudal masters, Andrew Horn praised King Alfred
whose chagrined submission to the scolding of the housewife,
after he forgot to take the bread out of the oven in time to
prevent its burning, endeared him to successive generations of
cooks, bakers, and humble folk. (What was he doing in her kitchen
in the first place? Apparently, he was in hiding having run away
from battle.) Horn brings forth other reasons why this monarch,
bad baker and reluctant soldier though he was, alone among all
England's kings and queens, is called great.
F.W. Maitland, Horn's Victorian
editor (Selden Society Publications, volume seven, 1893), noted
his "curious leanings towards liberty and equality."
He argued that Horn's understanding of the memory of Alfred among
the indigenous English was a "daring fable." As reasons,
Maitland sees  circumspection
in the naming of the judges, and surely the names are weird,
not the kind of names that we recognize as normal, like Thomas,
Scalia, or Rehnquist.
Horn attributes to Alfred the
policy of lex talionis which in our day has become a sly
accompaniment to prosecutorial blood-thirstiness, sadly saying
that capital punishment is part of the 'grieving process' for
the victims of violent crimes. Slay the young: that the old may
'move on.'
So from Book V of The Mirror
of Justices here is abuse number 108 (pp. 166-9).
"It is an abuse that justices
and their officers who slay folk by false judgments are not destroyed
like other homicides. And King Alfred in one year had forty-four
judges hanged as homicides for their false judgments.
"He hanged Watling, for
that he had judged Sidulf to death for receiving Edulf his son,
who was afterwards acquitted of the principal crime
"He hanged Signer, who
had judged Ulf to death after a sufficient acquittal.
"He hanged Eadwine, for
that he judged Hathewy to death without the assent of all the
jurors when he had put himself upon a jury of twelve men; and
because three against nine were for saving him, Eadwine removed
those three and put in their stead other thjree, upon whom Hathewy
had never put himself.
"He hanged Coel for judging
to death Yve, who was a lunatic.
"He hanged Malmere for
judging to death Prat, who, when desperate, had made a false
confession of felony.
"He hanged Athulf for
hanging Copping, who was under the age of twenty-one years.
"He hanged Markes, for
that he judged Duning to death upon the verdict of twelve men
who had not been sworn.
"He hanged Oscelin, foR
that he judged Seaman to death under a vicious warrant founded
on a false suggestion, which supposed that Seaman was in prison
before that he really was so.
"He hanged Billing, for
that he judged Lefston to death by fraud in this manner. Billing
said to the people, ëSit down all of you who did not kill
the man;' and then, because Lefston did not sit down with the
rest, he commanded that he should e hanged, and said that he
had made a sufficient confession by not sitting down.
"He hanged Sefoul, for
that he judged Ording to death for want of an answer.
"He hanged Thurstan, for
that he judged Thurgnor to death on a verdict taken ex officio
on which Thurgnor had not put himself.
"He hanged Athelstone,
for that he judged Herbert to death for a sin that was not mortal.
"He hanged Rumbold, for
that he judged Lifchil tto death in a case that was not notorious,
without appeal or indictment.
"He hanged Rof, for that
he judged Dunston to death for escape from prison.
"He hanged Freberne, for
that he judged Harpin to death when the jurors were in doubt
about their verdict, for in case of doubt one should rather save
than condemn.
"He hanged Sibright, for
that he judged Athelbrus to death for that he would not execute
on of his (Sibright's) false mortal judgments.
"He hanged Hale, for that
he saved from death Tristram the sheriff, who had taken wine
for the king's use, because between taking what is another's
without his will and robbery there is no difference.
"He hanged Arnolt, for
that he saved bailiffs who robbed folk by color of distress,
some of them by alienating naams and others by extortion of fines,
because between the extortion of a fine for the release of a
naam and robbery there is no difference.
"He hanged Erkenwold,
for that he hanged Franling for no other cause than because he
taught one whom he had vanquished in battle to say the word ëcraven.'
"He hanged Bemond, for
that he had Garbolt's head cut off by a judgment given in England
on an outlawry in Ireland.
"He hanged Alkemund, for
that he saved Cateman, who was attainted for hamsoken, by treating
it as a mere case of disseisin.
"He hanged Saxmund, for
that he hanged Berild in England where the king's writ ran, for
a deed done in a part of the same land in which the king's writ
did not run.
"He hanged Alflet, for
that he adjudged to death a clerk over whom he could have no
cognizance.
"He hanged Piron, for
that he judged Hunting to death, because he caused a judgment
to be executed before the fortieth day, pending an appeal to
the king by writ of false judgment.
"He hanged Dilling for
hanging Edous, who had slain a man by misadventure.
"He hanged Oswy, for that
at night time he judged Blithe to death.
"He hanged Osbert, for
that when not in a consistory he judged Fulcher to death.
"He hanged Horn, for that
on a prohibited day he hanged Swein.
"He hanged Bulmer, for
that he judged Gerent to death for the larceny of a thing that
he had received by bailment.
"He hanged Thurbern, for
that he judged Osgot to death for a deed of which he had already
been acquitted as against the same plaintiff; and Osgot offered
to aver the acquittal by a jury, and Thurbern would not receive
the allegation of acquittal because Osgot did not offer to aver
it by the record.
"He hanged Wolfston, for
that he judged Hubert to death at the king's suit for a deed
which Hubert had confessed, whereas the king had pardoned his
suit; but Hubert had no charter of pardon, but vouched the king
to warranty, and in addition offered to aver the pardon by the
enrolment in the chancery.
"He hanged Osketil, for
that he judged Culling to death on the record of the coroner,
where an allowable replication was not allowed him. The case
was this: Culling was taken and tortured until he confessed a
mortal sin, and this he did to be quit of further torture; and
Osketel [sic] judged him to death on his confession made to the
coroner, without trying the truth of the allegation as o the
torture and the other facts.
"And besides this, the
coroners, officers, assessors, and those who tortured folk, and
those who could have disturbed the false judgments but did not
do so, were hanged whenever the justices were hanged, for King
Alfred hanged all the judges whom he could attaint of having
falsely saved a guilty man from death, or falsely hanged folk
against law or in the teeth of a reasonable exception."
Peter Linebaugh teaches history at the University
of Toledo. He is the author of two of CounterPunch's favorite
books, The
London Hanged and (with Marcus Rediker) The
Many-Headed Hydra: the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic.
He can be reached at: plineba@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for September 18 / 19, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Forgeries,
Fingerprints and Forensic Fakery
Jeffrey St. Clair
High Plains Grifter: Bush's Mask of Anarchy
Patrick Cockburn
Into the Abyss: the Week Iraq's Dream of Peace Fell Apart
Fred Gardner
Pot Shots: Financial Torture (Asset Forfeiture)
Joe Allen
The Comrades Kerry Abandoned: the Real Story of Vietnam Vets
Against the War
George Corsetti
Poletown Revisited: Finally, Some Vindication
Scott Handleman
The Knock-Knock of a Sledgehammer: Sequestered in Nablus
Richard Ward
Two Weeks in Beit Arabiya
Conn Hallinan
Ashcroft and Indonesia
Lori Smith
Health Care in America: And Then I Got Sick...
Dave Zirin
Hold the Booyah!: SportsCenter Out of the Middle East
John L. Hess
Rather Will Take the Heat, As Bush's War Deteriorates
Brian J. Foley
W is for Wimp: So Why do Manly Men Love Him?
Mickey Z.
Pat Tillman and Osama bin Laden: Odd Juxtapositions
Poets' Basement
Vest, Landau & Albert
Website of the Weekend
Eye on the NYTs
/
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