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August 22, 2002
Alexander Cockburn
Taking
Down McKinney
August 21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The Return
of Mani
Romi Mahajan
Bhopal
on $40 a Day
Jerre Skog
Bush and
Europe:
Fun, Profit & Betrayal
Tom Crumpacker
The
Politics of the Cuba Embargo
August 20, 2002
Michael Neumann
The American
Left
and Palestine
William Blum
Chemical
Weapons, Iraq and the US: What the Times Left Out of the Story
Ralph Nader
The Politics
of Bankruptcy
Robert Fisk
The Two
Deaths of Abu Nidal
Philip Farruggio
Junk
School Nation
Edward Said
Disunity
and Factionalism
Kathleen Christison
Israeli
Tilt: the NYT
and Palestine
August 19, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Advance
Draft of Bush's 9/11 Anniversary Speech
Gavin Keeney
Auteur-Driven
Vehicles
Kurt Nimmo
Son of
COINTELPRO
David Krieger
Peace
Declarations from Hiroshima and Nagasaki
August 14 / 18, 2002
Susan Davis
Played
Out: a Journey to Central City, Colorado
CounterPunch Staff
Our Favorite
Films
Jeffrey St. Clair
Usonian
Utopia's:
Frank Lloyd Wright, Working Class Housing and the FBI
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon and the Iron Wall
Uri Avnery
A Phone
Call from Hell
Wendy Brinker
Racism
is Alive and Well in the South Carolina Death House
Hamit Dardagan
The
Unbearable Lightness of Bombing
Ahmad Faruqui
The Legacy
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Philip Farruggio
Leading
by Example
Anthony Gancarski
Union
Jackass: Richard Perle's UK Charm Offensive
Jeff Halper
Fortress
Israel: the Message of the Bulldozer
Robert Jensen
Our Failures
are Borne by the Palestinians
Gary Leupp
An Open
Letter to Bruce Springsteen about Bush's War on Terrorism
Dave Marsh
Sing a
Simple Song
Rashmi Mayur
To Johannesburg
in Search of Hope
Steve Perry
Another Fine Mess:
Martha Stewart and Paul Wellstone
Anis Shivani
What's
Next...Concentration Camps?
Edward Said
Punishment
by Detail
Jeff Taylor
Paul Wellstone's
Legacy
August 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
At the al--Qaeda
Cemetery
Mokhiber / Weissman
Corporate
Crime Time
Andrew Cockburn
Bono
Betrays Ireland
August 12, 2002
Messier / Dreier
The IDF
in Nablus:
Shooting at Kites;
Bulldozing Schools
Brian J. Foley
No Iraqi
Surprise: Look Now
at the Dangers of War
Fran Shor
Psychic
and Political Numbing
in Preparations for War
Resources:
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About 9/11
CounterPunch:
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Five
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Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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Reviews of Gore:
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August
22, 2002
Wither Congress,
Wither America?
Crushing Congressional Dissent: The Fall of Hilliard, Barr and
McKinney
by Wayne Madsen
Historians will one day write that the 107th Congress
was the last to stand up to the constitutional encroachment by
the military and monarchist policies of the Bush II administration.
Just as with the Roman Senate, the Congress of the United States
is becoming an elite club of pathetic assenters and global elitists.
Once the domain of great orators and dissenters like Cato and
Cicero, the Roman Senate was eventually subsumed by the Roman
Army when the Emperor took on dictatorial powers. The Roman Senate
could say nothing as the Roman dictatorship annexed Macedonia,
Spain, Greece, the Middle East, and North Africa. By the time
Emperors Tiberius and Septimius Severus took power, the Senate,
which had grown to an elite club of 600, was a rubber stamp body
that had no choice but to go along with the military's continued
usurpation of power.
The United States Congress stands on
the same precipice as its Roman ancestor. If Bush pulls another
electoral coup in 2004 and we see the presidential election thrown
into the House of Representatives, the future for the country
appears very dim.
The August 20 defeat of two Georgia Representatives,
one Democrat, the other Republican, is a bellwether event that
bodes ill for this November's elections. Rep. Cynthia McKinney
was successfully challenged by a Republican-turned-Democrat for
her Fourth District seat. Before a cleverly contrived political
operation was launched under the aegis of Georgia's other quasi-Republican,
Senator Zell Miller, no one outside of Georgia had ever heard
of former state judge Denise Majette, a self-described
supporter of fringe lunatic GOP presidential candidate Alan Keyes
in 2000. Majette will join in Congress fellow Ivy Leaguer Artur
Davis, who beat Alabama Democratic Representative Earl Hilliard
in that state's primary because of the latter's outspoken support
for a more even-handed Middle East policy. Hilliard and McKinney
join a long list of politicians who were defeated after advocating
an independent U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East: Senators
Charles Percy, James Abourezk, James Abdnor, and J. William Fulbright,
and Representatives Paul Findley and Paul McCloskey. The careers
of Adlai Stevenson and William Scranton were similarly ended
after they supported a Middle East policy less tied to the interests
of Israel. Only Michigan's veteran Representative John Dingell
was able to stave off a recent assault from the powerful American
Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) in a match off with
fellow Representative Lynn Rivers in a redrawn congressional
district.
However, Dingell's National Rifle Association
ally, Georgia Representative Bob Barr, was not as fortunate.
Barr was also a target of Miller's political operation. An opponent
of the more draconian elements in Bush's and John Ashcroft's
USA-PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security Department bill, Barr was
a target of opportunity for the extreme right that favors turning
the United States into a version of East Germany or North Korea.
Moreover, Barr's chairmanship of the House Subcommittee on Commercial
and Administrative Law gave him real gavel power to block Bush
and Ashcroft on critical civil liberties and privacy infringements,
a power Barr has not hesitated to wield. And after supporting
Steve Forbes in the 2000 GOP primary, Barr did not fit into Bush's
binary and simplistic world: "If you're not with me, you're
against me." Therefore, Miller, who, according to a former
aide, is targeting fellow Senator Max Cleland and Georgia Governor
Roy Barnes for defeat by conservative Republicans, figured out
that if Barr supporters in Gwinnett County, which straddles McKinney's
Fourth District and Barr's Seventh District, could be coaxed
into crossing over party lines and voting for Majette, it would
kill two birds with one stone. Barr would lose votes to his opponent
John Linder and McKinney would get trounced by Majette in a low
turnout (25 per cent) election with a high GOP crossover vote.
The gambit paid off. McKinney and Barr were both defeated handily,
McKinney with the help of 25,000 crossover votes. Of course,
the fact that people not authorized to vote in the Fourth District
may have voted anyway would fall into the category of election
fraud. But after the Florida debacle, the Ashcroft Justice Department
sees such electoral machinations as a way to remain in power
a la any totalitarian regime parading around before the world
as a democracy.
That McKinney and Barr were on the same
neo-conservative hit list was exemplified on August 21 by a second-tier
conservative radio talk show host in Washington, DC. Speaking
on WTNT-AM, Oral Roberts University graduate, Pat Buchanan political
adviser, and Tom DeLay-style Republican talk show host Michael
Graham said it was great news that two "kooks" had
been beaten in Georgia. He then stated he was talking about "Cynthia
McKinney and her photo negative twin, Bob Barr." The statement
was clearly racist in nature and a not-so-veiled reference, through
a warped attempt at humor, to Barr's long rumored African-American
heritage. But for the extreme right that dominates the GOP, such
incendiary ethnophobic comments are the rule and not the exception.
McKinney had incurred the wrath of the
White House by her question about what George W. Bush knew in
advance about the September 11 terrorist attacks. But that was
only the tip of the iceberg for the Republicans and their major
campaign contributors. While it true that McKinney has championed
the cause of Palestinian statehood and self-determination, thus
inviting the enmity of major Jewish organizations in the United
States, it was her long-time opposition to the trade of blood
diamonds and other strategic minerals in Africa that earned her
a major challenge from multinational corporations, including
Barrick Gold, on whose board President Bush's father serves as
an international adviser. Among its other misdeeds, Barrick has
been accused of helping to cover up the 1996 burying alive by
one of its subsidiaries of over 50 Tanzanian gold miners in Bulyanhulu,
in the northwest part of the country. Of course, when it comes
to the lives and welfare of non-white people, the Bushes have
never really held any soft spot, whether they are blacks in Africa
or America's inner cities, Afghan or Iraqi children, or even
a troubled half-Hispanic daughter/niece/granddaughter in Florida.
McKinney long advocated a halt in the
pilferage of blood diamonds out of African war zones. She cited,
on numerous occasions, the result of such commerce: the hacked
off limbs, hands, and ears of small children in Sierra Leone;
the permanent crippling from land mines of children in Angola
and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and over 2.5 million
deaths from civil wars in the DRC, Rwanda, Uganda, and Burundi.
The diamond profiteers from this mayhem and death are largely
the Hasidic diamond dealers of Antwerp, Amsterdam, New York,
and Tel Aviv. These dealers and their lobbyists often circled
in and out of House hearing rooms and McKinney's office when
issues relating to stemming the flow of ill-gotten African diamonds
came up for discussion. These diamond merchants also have a powerful
ally in long-time Democratic Party fundraiser and diamond cartel
magnate Maurice Tempelsman.
The 108th Congress, lacking the consciousness
of Cynthia McKinney and the skepticism of Bob Barr, will be a
far more dangerous place. I have had the pleasure of working
and knowing both of them over the years - fighting battles, in
the case of McKinney, against U.S. human rights offenses in Africa
and elsewhere and in the case of Barr, against rampant U.S. government
surveillance of the private lives and activities of American
citizens. The next Congress will be full of complacent African-American
parlor servants like Majette and Davis, dangerous extreme rightists
like former cockroach exterminator DeLay and former sportscaster
J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, pitiful morons like Florida's former
Secretary of State and chief election rigger Katherine Harris,
Republican moles and sleepers like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman,
and Democratic spineless amoebas like Richard Gephardt and Tom
Daschle. They will stand ready to back Bush's military campaigns
into Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Colombia, or wherever Bush's economic
interests are at stake. The country stands on the brink of disaster.
But we cannot count on the future Congress to save us. Lacking
a spine or any guts, it will surely help to bury us.
Wayne Madsen
is a Washington-based investigative journalist. He testified
before Cynthia McKinney's hearing on the genocide in the DRC
in May 2001 and has worked with Bob Barr on privacy legislation
in the past. He wrote the introduction to Forbidden
Truth.
Madsen can be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.com
Today's Features
Alexander Cockburn
Taking
Down Cynthia McKinney
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