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HOW HADITHA HAPPENED; WHY IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN "You live like an animal. You learn to like killing. .. Hate civilians. Can't trust the bastards. You hate taking prisoners. You'd rather kill them. Why?" Read Vietnam vet Marc Levy's extraordinary Primer on the Whys and Wherefores of PTSD and understand what is happening in Iraq. PLUS Andrew Lack on the incredible frauds of the bottled water industry. Why you should drink tapwater out of a glass and save your money PLUS Jeffrey St Clair on the deadly secrets of America's oldest bomb factory PLUS Chris Reed on Eros and Militarization: how Japan's sexpot schoolgirls fit into the right's Re-Arm agenda. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories June 15, 2006 Kathy Kelly Norman Solomon Ron Jacobs Sam Bahour Ramzy Baroud CounterPunch Wire Gabriel Kolko Website of the Day
June 14, 2006 Nicole Colson Jonathan Cook Joseph Schechla Michael Carmichael Evelyn Pringle Ward Churchill Rev. William E. Alberts Website of the
Day
June 13, 2006 Medea Benjamin Anthony Alessandrini Paul D'Amato Dave Lindorff John Ross Gabriel Garcia Hilton Obenzinger Yitzhak Laor Juan Antonio
Ocasio Rivera Jennifer Van
Bergen Website of the
Day
June 12, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Patrick Cockburn Mike Marqusee Lee Sustar Robert Fisk Michael J. Smith Felice Pace Jennifer Loewenstein Website of the Day
June 10 / 11,
2006 Robert Fisk Diane Christian Joe Allen Ralph Nader Fred Gardner Dave Lindorff Dave Zirin /
John Cox Dennis Perrin Greg Moses John Chuckman Michael J. Smith Roger Burbach Ira Moskowitz Sam Bahour Seth Sandronsky Michael Berg Kirsten Roberts Ron Jacobs Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of the
Weekend
June 9, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Paul Craig Roberts Gary Leupp Eric Ruder Evelyn Pringle Mickey Z. Michael J. Smith Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
June 8, 2006 Chris Floyd Michael Dickinson Ron Jacobs William S. Lind Joshua Frank Missy Comley Beattie Lloyd Williams Bill Christison Website of the Day
June 7, 2006 Dave Lindorff Sunsara Taylor John Walsh David MacMichael Mickey Z. Evelyn Pringle Myles Palmer Laura Ribeiro Website of the Day
June 6, 2006 Diane Christian Paul Craig Roberts Ralph Nader Norman Solomon Darmont / Genovali Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Subcomandante Marcos Patrick Cockburn Website of the Day
June 5, 2006 Bruce Jackson Chris Floyd Michael Neumann Heather Gray William Hughes David Swanson Alexander Cockburn Website of the Day
June 3 / 4, 2006 Robert Fisk James Petras Rosemary Radford Ruether Harry Clark Jeffrey St. Clair Ron Ridenour Ron Jacobs Fred Gardner Peter Montague John Walsh Greg Moses Sean Donahue Mike Whitney Dave Patten Ali Khan Robert Dotson,
MD Hammond Guthrie St. Clair / D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website of the
Day
June 2, 2006 Kathy Kelly Alan Maass Mickey Z. Dave Lindorff Chris Kutalik Sunsara Taylor Sam Husseini Mike Ferner Website of the
Day
June 1, 2006 Brian Cloughley David Peterson Lee Ballinger Jonathan Cook Mike Whitney Paul Rockwell Clifton Ross Kevin Zeese Website of the
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May 31, 2006 Dave Lindorff Joshua Frank Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz P. Sainath Ramzy Baroud Seth Sandronsky Mickey Z. Ralph Nader Jeffrey St. Clair Website of the Day
May 30, 2006 Lee Ballinger Jonathan Cook Gary Leupp John Ross Robert Jensen Michael Dickinson Michael Carmichael Tim Wise Harry Browne Website of the
Day
May 27 / 29,
2006 Paul Craig Roberts Kathleen Christison Kathy Kelly Christopher
Reed Lawrence R. Velvel Tom Barry Gary Leupp Col. Dan Smith Ron Jacobs Don Fitz Fred Gardner Peter Montague Raymond Garcia John Farley Seth Sandronsky Tia Steele Lenni Brenner Dr. Susan Block Scott Michael Perey Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Recipe of the
Weekend Website of the Weekend
May 26, 2006 Col. Douglas
MacGregor Brian J. Foley Michael Dickinson Missy Comley Beattie Pierre Tristam Joe Allen Kona Lowell Roger Burbach Website of the
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May 25, 2006 Les AuCoin Jeff Halper Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Bob Wing Elise Gould Robert Bryce Website of the Day
May 24, 2006 Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Lucinda Marshall Dave Lindorff Shmuel Rosner Moshe Adler Heather Gray Pratyush Chandra Paul Craig Roberts Floyd Rudmin Website of the Day
May 23, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Sharon Smith Sunsara Taylor Joel Whitney Alice Cherbonnier Ron Jacobs Kristen Ess Patrick Cockburn Website of the
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Weekend
Edition On the Migrant TrailNo More Walls, No More DeathsBy JOSEPH NEVINS On Sunday, June 4, about two hundred people filed by individuals wailing over what appeared to be corpses in front of the U.S. Border Patrol's sector headquarters in Tucson, Arizona. The march and the guerrilla theater-a "die-in"-were the culmination of a seven-day, 75-mile trek from Sasabe, Sonora, a small Mexican border town and a major staging area for migrants clandestinely entering the United States. The march, known as the Migrant Trail, took place for the third consecutive year. Sponsored by variety of border and migrant rights, humanitarian, and religious groups-including the Tucson-based Derechos Humanos/Alianza Indígena, No More Deaths, Borderlinks, the Christian Peacemaker Team, and Witness for Peace-it seeks to bring critical attention to the growing death toll along the U.S.-Mexico boundary and the fundamentally flawed border and immigration policies that make the fatalities inevitable. More than 3,800 migrants have lost their lives since 1995 while trying to cross from Mexico into the United States. The estimate is conservative in that it only includes confirmed deaths. Many more bodies are never found. As such, the grim toll is surely much higher. The deaths peak during the summer months. And the summer started early this year in southern Arizona, the epicenter of the borderlands' killing fields. In mid-May, a three-year-old boy, David Rodriguez Reyes, died in the desert in his mother's arms. Twelve more migrant bodies would be discovered in Arizona before the end of the month. The fatalities, on the rare
occasion that they are discussed in Washington and the halls
of power, are either treated as a public relations problem or
cynically used to justify more of the very policies-such as the
boundary But it is the call for "security" that most typically underlies support for more walls and fences along the U.S.-Mexico divide. Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado), for instance, stated in February that "Yes, many who come across the [U.S.-Mexico] border are workers. But among them are people coming to kill you and me and your children." Although few are as hysterical as Tancredo, the basic assumptions regarding boundary and immigration enforcement are shared by most Democrats and Republicans, resulting in a stale congressional and national debate and a narrow set of policy options. While the infamous Sensenbrenner bill (HR 4437) requires 700 miles of additional walls and fences, the alternative offered by the Senate calls for 370 miles of triple fencing and 500 miles of barriers to block vehicles. It would also add another 14,000 agents to the Border Patrol by 2011, more than doubling the agency's current size. It is on this basis that advocates of "reform" hope that some sort of compromise will be achieved between the House and Senate. In this impoverished context, the plan offered by the Bush White House (one that combines legalization of status for most, but not all, of the undocumented population with far greater repression along and within the country's boundaries, and one largely mirrored by the Senate bill) has become the "reasonable" standard. At a forum on international human rights workers in late May, former president Jimmy Carter called Bush's approach, one that includes the deployment of 6,000 National Guard troops to the border region, "quite admirable." A few days earlier, Bill Clinton, while speaking to a Las Vegas convention of shopping mall developers, stated that Bush was doing a "good job" on the matter. In speaking as he did, Bill Clinton was being true to form. It was his administration that launched the massive boundary build-up that now scars the borderlands, and enacted the legislation that has resulted in a massive increase of deportations (over one million since 1996). He was also playing the role of a supportive husband. Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, who, in late-March, characterized the Sensenbrenner bill as both "un-American" and "un-Christian," has positioned herself as a border hawk. In late-April-only two-weeks after attending a huge immigrant rights march in New York City at which she seemed to wholeheartedly embrace the marcher's goals-she called for additional border walls "in certain places" along with high-tech "smart fencing," while suggesting that Israel's wall might serve as a potential model. "A country that cannot control its borders is failing at one of its fundamental obligations," she explained. Meanwhile, the death toll in southern Arizona and throughout the border region continues to rise, and will surely do so for the foreseeable future as migrants are pushed into increasingly risky routes. During the Migrant Trail walk across the desert, the media reported the deaths of one male migrant in Arizona, and of two men in New Mexico to where some migrant traffic has gone in response to the build-up in Arizona. Another six died this past weekend in Arizona. More undoubtedly died beyond the view of the media. There have been so many migrant deaths in Arizona of late that Pima County's medical examiner's morgue in Tucson is overflowing. It still contains bodies from last summer as the examiner struggles to identify the corpses. As a result, the county has rented a refrigerated trailer to store bodies and is now in the process of building a new cool room for 300 bodies, almost doubling the morgue's current capacity. To stop this carnage and the underlying injustices will require much more political conviction and imagination than is now on offer in Washington. Only by stepping outside the hyper-nationalist, Democrat-Republican box-one also generally supportive of neoliberal policies abroad that exacerbate the conditions that lead to out-migration-can we begin to bring about a world in which migrant deaths are a phenomenon of the past. This requires, among other things, that all people have a basic right to international mobility and residence. Joseph Nevins is an assistant professor of geography at Vassar College. He is the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary (Routledge, 2002) and, most recently, A Not-so-distant Horror: Mass Violence in East Timor (Cornell University Press, 2005). His email is jonevins@vassar.edu.
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                    |
