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Today's
Stories
March 19, 2004
Vicente Navarro
The End of Aznar, Bush's Best
Friend
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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
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for More Stories.
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March
19, 2004
A Week is a Long Time in Politics
Fortress
Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
By WILLIAM MACDOUGALL
Tuesday the 16th March was a day like any other
in Britain. Yet, as Dinah Washington once famously sang, a lot
can indeed happen within the space of those twenty-four little
hours. On the Tuesday in question, great play was made of the
fact that a British citizenship ceremony for immigrants took
place in Glasgow for the first time in Scotland's history. The
event, announced to great fanfare, was a symbolic affirmation
of the welcoming and inclusionist modern multicultural country
that Britain had become. Speaking to those assembled for the
first citizenship ceremony to take place on Scottish soil, Glasgow's
Lord Provost proudly noted that "In taking the oath, our
newest citizens have given a commitment to uphold the values
of British citizenship...respect for law, freedom of speech,
tolerance and respect for other people's beliefs and our democratic
principles."
The happy event was attended by Sir Bernard
Crick, chairman of the Life in the UK Advisory Group and Home
Office adviser on citizenship. The assembled citizens-to-be who
have made their way to Britain from counties like India, Pakistan,
South Africa and Turkey were rightly proud of their special day
and their newfound status as British citizens. There can be no
doubting the seriousness with which new British citizens proudly
adopt their responsibilitiy to uphold the values of freedom of
speech, tolerance and respect for other people's beliefs and
democratic principles. The same, sadly, cannot be said of a silent
Scottish Executive which shamefully continues to wash its hands
of asylum related issues by claiming that detention and immigration
policy is the sole preserve of Westminster. Nor a Home Office
led by a Home Secretary who gleefully sets about dismantling
judicial checks and balances in the name of national security
all the while creating more and more detention spaces for asylum
seekers.
Elsewhere in Glasgow on Tuesday, three
Kurdish men on hunger strike since the middle of February lay
on their mattresses with their lips sown together waiting for
salvation or death. The men, Kurdish Iranians who have exhausted
all possible avenues to escape deportation to Iran where they
claim they will almost certainly be killed, had sown their lips
together in a final dramatic attempt to bring attention to their
plight. Two of the men were hospitalised last week after losing
consciousness. They later discharged themselves. Thus far, their
pleas to Scotland's First Minister Jack McConnell, to visit them
and to help intervene against their deportation have fallen upon
deaf ears. The plight of the three men has gained cross party
support in Scotland, with church leaders and campaigners also
calling on the Scottish Executive to defy the Home Office by
acting to ensure they are not deported to Iran. The silence from
Scotland's First Minister, Jack McConnell, has been deafening.
Last year, the Scottish Executive shamefully batted all asylum
enquiries by claiming that policy on detention and welfare was
solely a matter for Westminster and the Home Office.
The Scottish Refugee Council has questioned
the quality of Iran human rights data used by the British government
and has called on the government to urgently address the question
of asylum application errors. "Iran has an extremely poor
human rights record" say senior Scottish Refugee Council
manager Peter Barry, "one can only imagine the treatment
of any individual who has staged such a high profile protest
against the Iranian regime upon his return to Iran."
Blunkett's shiny citizenship ceremony
PR triumph aside (where British citizens-to-be pledge an outmoded
monarchist oath of allegiance to Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth
II, her heirs and successors according to law), the Home Office
also announced plans to increase the capacity of the notorious
Dungavel immigration detention centre to 200 with the creation
of a 43 bed unit for single males. Situated in Strathaven in
Lanarkshire, the privately run former prison has been a constant
fixture in the newspaper headlines for its treatment and incarceration
of families for periods of up to one year. Home Secretary David
Blunkett's insistence that "increasing the amount of space
in the detention estate is an important part of our strategy
to remove those people who have no right to be here" flies
in the face of the mood of a Scottish public outraged at the
continuing imprisonment of children at Dungavel and horrifiied
by stories of asylum seekers mutilating themselves to highlight
their predicament (followers of British political life will have
come to expect little better from a Home Secretary whose generosity
of spirit is such that he intends to charge victims of miscarriages
of justice more than lbs3000 bed and board for every year they
wrongly spent in jail).
All this on the same day that Sir Brian
Barder also chose to announce his resignation from the Special
Immigration Appeals Commission (Siac), claiming that a number
of court rulings gave the Home Secretary "such wide discretion
as to make his powers virtually unaccountable." On Wednesday
a destitute Sudanese asylum seeker won a High Court ruling that
his treatment had been "inhuman and degrading". 27
year old Yusif Adam was denied access to publicly funded accomodation
and food help under section 55 (5) of the 2002 Nationality, Immigration
and Asylum Act because he had failed to make his claim "as
soon as reasonably practicable." Mr Adam, whose body showed
proof of injury concommitent with claims of detention abuses
in Sudan, is illiterate and speaks only Arabic. Finding that
his Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights had
been breached, the judge ruled it was now incumbent on the Home
Secretary to provide assistance to the Sudanese who had been
sleeping rough in a car park.
Earlier this month, Lord Woolf, the most
senior judge in England and Wales, fiercely criticised government
plans to limit the right of appeal for asylum seekers, saying
they were "fundamentally in conflict with the rule of law"
and a "blot on the reputation of the government." Woolf
has attacked government plans to create a supreme court and considers
Blunkett's incursions into the judicial arena as being such a
threat to judicial independence to merit a written constitution
protecting judges from political interference. Maeve Sherlock,
Chief Executive of the Refugee Council, observed that the "government's
plans would deny asylum seekers a fair hearing by blocking court
challenges of bad or legally flawed decisions. It is difficult
to see how that can be defended when we are talking about matters
of life and liberty." Woolf might well belong to Blunket's
"woolly-thinking, liberal-minded brigade", but he exacted
some kind of judicial revenge on the Home Office by releasing
a Libyan held for 16 months without charge or trial. Denying
the Home Secretary leave to appeal their decision, Lord Woolf
and two justices claimed that Blunkett had acted "inappropriately"
and "unlawfully" in describing the Libyan dissident
as an international terrorist with links to al Qaida.
Blunkett's citizenship ceremony should
be seen for what it really is - a smokescreen which allows the
further tightening of already strict immigration and asylum legislation
administered by an out of touch Home Secretary who chooses to
address his critic from behind a bluff Sheffield facade of insults
and catcalling. It is also the act of a government in no hurry
to relinquish power for the sake of a few asylum seekers, sorry,
"economic migrants", as Home Office parlance has it.
Last September, the Home Office turned the deportation of 48
failed asylum seekers from the Czech Republic into an anti-asylum
seeking PR exercise - "Operation Elgar" - by allowing
television crews to film the group as they boarded a charter
flight destined for Prague. It was hoped that the resulting Czech
broadcast of children hiding their faces fugitive-like would
dissuade further Roma from setting out for Britain. Forget news-friendly
citizenship ceremonies, this is the reality behind Blunkett's
"Fortress Britain" vision.
Back in Glasgow, the three men thankfully
ended their hunger strike on Thursday 18th March in response
to the overwhelming level of support expressed by the Scottish
public to their cause and messages from their respective families
who read reports of their protest in the Iranian press. They
intend to continue to oppose their deportation in less life threatening
ways. The publicity created in Iran by their protest now makes
their return there completely unthinkable. Harold Wilson once
famously observed that "a week is a long time in politics".
"Not when you're waging a war against economic migrants
it's not" you can imagine David Blunkett saying.
William MacDougall can be reached at: willmacdougall@netscape.net
Weekend
Edition Features for March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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