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Inside the New Print Edition of CounterPunch: Labor at the Crossroads

First the Wedding; Now the Wake: Big Labor's New Unity Partnership by JoAnn Wypijewski; Report from Baghdad: How Did the Votes Add Up: by Patrick Cockburn. Tsunamis of Blood: Wolfowitz in Indonesia: by Joseph Nevins; ALSO Alexander Cockburn on Tsunami Aid: How the People Scored. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. 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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Wars of the Laptop Bombers

 

Today's Stories

February 12 / 13, 2005

John Feffer
Bush v. N. Korea: Round Two

February 11, 20055

Manuel Garcia, Jr
The Eight Percent War

Kurt Nimmo
Ann Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need Him?

Dave Lindorff
Guckert or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In

Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott Abrams

Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz

Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion

Jennifer Van Bergen
Lynne Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All

 

February 10, 2005

Dave Lindorff
What Academic Freedom?

Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq

Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed

Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?

Suzan Mazur
More on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha

Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition

Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little Hope"

Greg Moses
Taking Jesus Back from the Hijackers

Website of the Day
The Missionary Positions

 

February 9, 2005

Jeffrey St. Clair
Duck and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers

Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say

John Ross
Hecho en Mexico: the Iraqi Election

Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon

Conn Hallinan
The Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion

Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely Forbidden"

Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions

Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians

Website of the Day
Support Antiwar.com

 

February 8, 2005

Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral Pact, Not a Party"

Brian Cloughley
Out of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"

Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"

Harry Browne
"Don't Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland

Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President and Ward Churchill

Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the Same Beast

Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper

David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq

 

 

February 7, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Bush's War on Jobs

Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher Ed

Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill

Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill

Patrick Cockburn
The Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq

Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism

Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried

Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI

Tariq Ali
Imperial Delusions

 

 

 

 

February 5 / 6, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Ward Churchill and the Mad Dogs

Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day

Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill

P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami

Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust

Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America

Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story

Pamela Olson
West Bank Story

Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West

Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court

Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents

Robert Fisk
History by Laptop

David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome

Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada

Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love

Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life

Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside

Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy

Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the Game

Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert

Website of the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File

February 4, 2005

Brian Cloughley
The Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"

Bill Christison
Election Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005

Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?

Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft

Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal

Ron Jacobs
The Downward Spiral in Iraq

 

 

February 3, 2005

Ward Churchill
On the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications and Gross Distortions

Sharon Smith
Resisting Soldiers Need Our Support

Mickey Z.
Leslie Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?

Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union

Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan

Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq

Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence

Dave Lindorff
The Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies

 

 

February 2, 2005

David Domke / Kevin Coe
Bush's Brand of Christianity

Noam Chomsky
Iraq After the Elections

M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me in Its Crosshairs

Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen

Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean

Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT

Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn

Website of the Day
War is a Racket

 

 

February 1, 2005

Joshua L. Dratel
The Torture Memos

Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi

Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"

Uri Avnery
The Stalemate

Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal

Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel

Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades

Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified Voters

Paul Craig Roberts
American Police State

Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors

 

 

 

January 31, 2005

Dave Zirin
Mr. Frank's Fatwah: New Republic Writer Calls for Death & Torture of Arundhati Roy and Stan Goff

Robert Fisk
Amid Tragedy, Defiance

Chyng Sun
Gonzales: Chief Prosecutor of Porn?

Greg Moses
The Real Scandals of the Texas Election

Mike Whitney
Cheney at Auschwitz

Ali Tonak
Turkey and the EU: Fantasies and Ultimatums

Patrick Cockburn
A Victory for the Shia

Website of the Day
Voting by the Script: Where Did the 8 Million Voter Turnout Figure Come From?

 

 

January 29 / 30, 2005

Manuel Yang / Peter Linebaugh
A Dialogue About Murder in Toledo

Gabriel Kolko
Wilsonian and Neoconservative Myths

Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad: City of Empty Streets

Robert Fisk
This Election Will Change the World, But Not as the US Wanted

Linn Washington, Jr.
Con Job: Bush Pledges on Racism Lack Realism

Bernard Chazelle
Why the Children of Iraq Make No Sound When They Fall

Gary Leupp
"This Kind of Subject Matter": Bush's New Ed Secretary vs. Vermont's Lesbians

JoAnn Wypijewski
The Passion of Paul Shanley

Alexander Cockburn
The Case of Father Jerry

Ron Jacobs
Ballot of the Puppets in Iraq

Brian Cloughley
Smart Bombs; Wrong House: Iraq's Civilian Dead

Fred Gardner
Peron May Split

Sister Dianna Ortiz
Memo to Bush from a Survivor of the Guatemalan Torturers: Stop the Torture!

Tom Reeves
How Bush Brings Freedom to the World: the Case of Haiti

Fran Quigley
Report: Haiti Now "More Violent and More Inhuman"

Suzan Mazur
"Mr. Garsin from Kinshasa": an Old Hand Weighs In on the Murder of Lumumba

Kurt Nimmo
Condi Rice and the Neocon Plan for the Palestinians

Lenni Brenner
Holocaust History: Beyond the UN's Rhetoric

Gilad Atzmon
The Politics of Auschwitz

Luis Gomez
Power and Autonomy in Bolivia

Mark Gaffney
NASA Searches for a Snowball in Hell: Why Velikovsky Matters

Ben Tripp
Lament of the Mnemonopath

Richard Oxman
Meet the Fuqers

Poets' Basement
Louise, Collins, Shanahan and Albert

Website of the Weekend
Chemical Industry: Deceit and Denial

 

 

 

January 28, 2005

Rachard Itani
Tsunami Aid By the Numbers: the US Really is a Miser

Jensen / Youngblood
Iraq's Non-Election

Patrick Cockburn / Elizabeth Davies
Attacks on Polling Places Leave 13 Dead

Dave Zirin
The Great Donovan McNabb: Proud "Black Quarterback"

Dave Lindorff
Suicide by State Execution?

Karyn Strickler
A Corporate Death Penalty Act?

Jorge Mariscal
Fighting the Poverty Draft

 

 

January 27, 2005

Seymour Hersh
We've Been Taken Over By a Cult

Cockburn / Sengupta
The US's Bloodiest Day in Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Juke Box Journalism: Shilling for Bush

Ignacio Chapela / John F. García
The Laws of Nature

Mike Whitney
The Widening Chasm Among Conservatives

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
Those Liberal Southern Baptists!

Ray McGovern
Reining In Cheney

Russ Wellen
Marginalizing Bin Laden

Christopher Brauchli
The FBI's Carnival of Errors

Website of the Day
Informed Eating

 

 

 

 

January 26, 2005

Saree Makdisi
An Iron Wall of Colonization: Fantasies and Realities About the Prospects for Middle East Peace

Scott Fleming
In Good Conscience: an Interview with Concientious Objector Aidan Delgado

Dave Lindorff
Filling Saddam's Shoes: the Puppet Regime Return's to Torture

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts

Toni Solo
The US and Latin America: a Not-So-Magical Reality

William James Martin
Condoleezza Rice: Confused About the Middle East

William A. Cook
Bush's Second Inaugural Address: the Lost Ur-Version

Eric Hobsbawm
Delusions About Democracy

Alexander Cockburn
The CIA's New Campus Spies

 

 

January 25, 2005

Brian Cloughley
Iraq as Disneyland

Mike Roselle
Satan is My Co-Pilot

Josh Frank / Merlin Chowkwanyun
The War on Civil Liberties

John Chuckman
Freedom on Steroids

Paul Craig Roberts
A Party Without Virtue

Dr. Teresa Whitehurst
The Intolerance of Christian Conservatives

James Petras
The US / Colombia Plot Against Venezuela

Website of the Day
Lowbaggers for the Environment

 

 

January 24, 2005

Fred Gardner
Last Monologue in Burbank

Lori Berenson
On the Politicization of My Case

Uri Avnery
King George

January 22 / 23, 2005

Jennifer Van Bergen / Ray Del Papa
Nuclear Incident in Montana

Alexander Cockburn
Prince Harry's Travails

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Company That Runs the Empire: Lockheed and Loaded

Stan Goff
The Spectacle

Saul Landau
Nothing Succeeds Like Failure

Gary Leupp
Official Madness and the Coming War on Iran

Fred Gardner
Is GW Getting the Runaround?

Phil Gasper
Clemency Denied: the Politics of Death in California

Stanley Heller
A Kill-Happy Government: Connecticut Chooses Death

Greg Moses
The Heart of Texas: an Inauguration Day Betrayal on Civil Rights

Justin Taylor
The Folk-Histories of John Ross

Daniel Burton-Rose
One China; Many Problems

Elaine Cassel
Try a Little Tyranny: Questions While Watching the Inaugural

Mike Whitney
Failing Upwards: the Rise of Michael Chertoff

Mark L. Berenson
My Daughter Has Been Wrongly Imprisoned

Christopher Brauchli
It Doesn't Compute: a $170 Million Mistake

Gilad Atzmon
Zionism and Other Marginal Thoughts

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Day of the Rats

Mark Donham
The Secret Messages of Rahm Emmanuel

Ben Tripp
Adventures in Online Dating

Walter Brasch
Hollywood's Patriots: Soulless Kooks, Mr. Bush?

Poets' Basement
Wuest, Landau, Ford, Albert & Drum

 

 

January 21, 2005

Dave Lindorff
A Great American Journalist:
John L. Hess (1917-2005)

Sharon Smith
The Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance

Don Santina
Baseball, Racism and Steroid Hysteria

Ron Jacobs
Locked Out and Pissed Off: Protesting the Bush Inauguration

Kurt Nimmo
The Problem with Mike Ruppert

Don Monkerud
Once They Were Cults: Bush's Faith-Based Social Services

Alan Farago
Swimming Home from the Galapagos

Derek Seidman
An Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta

 

 

 

January 20, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Dying for Sycophants

William Cook
The Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite

Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next

Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War

Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State

Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office

Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions

David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test

James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom

CounterPunch Staff
Voices from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party

 

 

 

January 19, 2005

Marta Russell
Social Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk

Mike Ferner
Marines Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo

Nancy Oden
The Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture

Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security

Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies

Alexander Cockburn
Will Bush Quit Iraq?

 

 

 

January 18, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
How Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity

Jennifer Van Bergen
Federal Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva Conventions

Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time

Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?

Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese Oil Pact?

Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire

Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins

Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher

 

 

January 17, 2005

Heather Gray
Misconceptions About King's Methods for Social Change

Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq

Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US Military

Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One of Texas's Worst Polluters

Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance

Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King

Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier

Greg Moses
King and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option

 

January 15 / 16, 2005

James Petras
The Kidnapping of a Revolutionary

Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad

Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service

Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza

Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert

Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005

John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife

Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci

M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission

Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"

Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq

Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba

Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal

John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old

Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism

Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle

Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism

Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon

 

 

January 14, 2005

Robert Fisk
"The Tent of Occupation"

Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job

José M. Tirado
The Christians I Know

Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson

Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"

Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence

Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti

Tom Barry
Robert Zoellick: a Bush Family Man

Website of the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?

 

 

January 13, 2005

Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer
Hearts and Minds, Revisited

Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror, Elections and Democracy

Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not

Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting

Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?

Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps

Gary Leupp
"Fighting for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America

 

 

January 12, 2005

Robert Fisk
Fear Stalks Baghdad

Josh Frank
The Farce of the DNC Contest

Jack Random
Casualties of War: the Untold Stories

John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule

Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami

Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS

Alan Farago
Can the Everglades be Saved?

Paul Craig Roberts
What's Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?

 

 

January 11, 2005

Tom Barry
The US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon of Foreign Policy

James Hodge and Linda Cooper
Voice of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the the Americas

Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia

Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote

Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections

Harry Browne
Irish "Peace Process", RIP

 

January 10, 2005

Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs

Talli Nauman
Killing Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press

Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue

Dave Lindorff
Tucker Carlson's Idiot Wind

Dave Zirin
Randy Moss's Moondance

Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party

Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves

William A. Cook
Causes and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel

 

 

January 8 / 9, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
Say, Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?

John H. Summers
Chomsky and Academic History

Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft

Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism

Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace

John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans

Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon

Fred Gardner
Situation NORML

Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone

Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out

Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution

Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61

Saul Landau
Sex and the Country

Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout

Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine

Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued

Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins


January 7, 2005

Omar Barghouti
Slave Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation

Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist Arrested

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami

David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties

Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story

Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives

Christopher Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS

Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor
Bush, the Pentagon and the Tsunami

 

 

January 6, 2005

Brian J. Foley
Gonzales: Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin

Greg Moses
Boot Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal

Petras / Chomsky
An Open Letter to Hugo Chavez

Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar

Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror

Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent

P. Sainath
The Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor

 

 

January 5, 2005

Alan Farago
2004: An Environmental Retrospective

Winslow T. Wheeler
Oversight Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam

Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective

Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working

David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows

Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview

Bruce Jackson
Death on the Living Room Floor

 

 

 

January 4, 2005

Michael Ortiz Hill
Mainlining Apocalypse

Elaine Cassel
They Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial

Yoram Gat
The Year in Torture

Martin Khor
Tragic Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster

Gary Leupp
Death and Life in the Andaman Islands

 

January 3, 2005

Ron Jacobs
The War Hits Home

Dave Lindorff
Is There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?

Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag

Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows

Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid

Rhoda and Mark Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice

David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount

Kathleen Christison
Patronizing the Palestinians

 

 

January 1 / 2, 2005

Gary Leupp
Earthquakes and End Times, Past and Present

Rev. William E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian Tendencies

M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America

Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy

Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant

Sylvia Tiwon / Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh

Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004

Greg Moses
A Visible Future?

Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire

Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence

James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly

David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn

Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert

 

 

 

 

December 23, 2004

Chad Nagle
Report from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood

David Smith-Ferri
The Real UN Disgrace in Iraq

Bill Quigley
Death Watch for Human Rights in Haiti

Mickey Z.
Crumbs from Our Table

Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas

Greg Moses
When No Law Means No Law

Alan Singer
An Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat

David Price
Social Security Pump and Dump

Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid

 

December 22, 2004

James Petras
An Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre Historical Amnesia

Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel

Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit

Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge

Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column

Kathleen Christison
Imagining Palestine

Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos

 

 

December 21, 2004

Greg Moses
The New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV

Dave Lindorff
Losing It in America: Bunker of the Skittish

Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk

Dragon Pierces Truth*
Concrete Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam

Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"

Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti

Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report

Paul Craig Roberts
America Locked Up: a System of Injustice

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Weekend Edition
February 12 / 13, 2005

Viva La Cucaracha!

Plaut and the ChronWatch Crazies

By KURT NIMMO

Steven Plaut, a Zionist on the faculty of the Graduate School of Business Administration at the University of Haifa, in the outlaw state of Israel, thinks I'm a cockroach -- or more accurately, one of "Cockburn's Cockroaches," a reference to Alexander Cockburn, coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of Counterpunch.

As I wrote St. Clair, after he forwarded a copy of Plaut's derisive screed (The Lunatic Left: Ward Churchill and Counterpunch.com) -- wherein the good instructor of business lambasted several writers -- and posted on the ChronWatch web site earlier today, I am honored to be a "Cockburn Cockroach." I wear it as a badge of honor as I scurry about on my tiny brown legs, sort of like a character in a Kafka novel, my antennae clacking away at the computer keyboard, defending "pro-terror professors," most notably Ward Churchill and Shahid Alam.

Since I am a mere 40 miles from Mexico, here in southern New Mexico, where the first language is often Spanish -- much the chagrin of right-wingers -- I prefer to be called a Cockburn cucaracha.

Viva La Cucaracha!

Reading Plaut's denunciation, I had to laugh, or at least chuckle, because, as usual, it is a whole lot of something about absolutely nothing.

Plaut offers the same bland and oft-repeated fare served up by the likes of David Horowitz, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Bill Bennett, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and a nearly inexhaustible roster of right-wing paranoiacs who believe a small number of mostly marginalized, in the larger media sense, "treasonous lunatics and Hate-America neurotics" are nothing less than a portentous threat to America. It irks these busy-bodies to no end that a few lefty profs and instructors have taken refuge on the campuses of America, about the only place left for them to work in peace, or so it seemed until Lynne Cheney and Bill Bennett, drawing on the inquisitional example of Daniel Pipes and David Horowitz, decided to run them off as a dire threat to the current generation of students.

Of course, these far right field paranoiacs -- or possibly crazy, as in delusional -- as demonstrated by Plaut's perfectly timed malediction, are not strictly interested in a few Marxist or even Ethnic Studies professors. No, they shall not rest until all of the "semi-civilized" beasts are exorcised from America, or at least written off as "Hate-America neurotics" whose "politics reflect little more than an infantile anger at Mommy and Daddy" (as if Mommy and Daddy were serial murderers, responsible for the methodical slaughter of 500,000 Iraqi children).

Since a lot of us harboring "infantile anger" at invasions predicated on lies and deception, fought with nuclear weapons such as depleted uranium -- a weapon that will ultimately kill millions of Iraqis for thousands of years to come, to say nothing of Americans and Israelis such as the self-righteous Plaut, since we all share a biosphere -- are not professors on the public dime, now is the time to attack web sites such as Counterpunch ... and for good reason, since CounterPunch is one of the more popular and well-read sites, drawing tens of thousands of readers every single day.

Plaut dutifully stacks up the charges: anti-Semitism, slavish kow-towing to terrorists, and a generalized and absurd all-encompassing hatred for America. In other words, the gall to criticize Israel for torturing and murdering Palestinians with impunity (a crime we can specifically place at Plaut's academic doorstep, since he is an employee of the Israeli state), the effrontery to point out the obvious, as Churchill did -- a murderous foreign policy, exacted over decades, will ultimately come back to haunt its perpetrators, or at least their uninformed fellow citizens (Cheney has bunker for such events) -- and the insolence not to march along with Bush and the Strausscons, pom-poms in hand, cheering ever onward generational war in such places as Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and eventually the big kahuna, Saudi Arabia.

For Plaut, the first item on the list is to convince us Alexander Cockburn is a despicable anti-Semite. It fails miserably if you have read Cockburn. But then, as we know, these right-wingers only read paragraphs pointed out them, as in the case of Ward Churchill, thus deciding to misunderstand the larger context.

One of Cockburn's more objectionable deeds, as Plaut tells us, is to have published an article by Shahid Alam, another professor on Bill "phone sex" O'Reilly's sensationalistic (and profitable for advertisers) hit list. In the course of his tirade, if I understand correctly -- since I am not in the habit of watching Mr. Bill, the Torquemada, or Grand Inquisitor of Fox News -- Bill fulminated against both Alam and Counterpunch.

Shahid Alam's crime?

The professor of economics at Northeastern University characterized the September 11, 2001, attack on America as a response to foreign occupation.

Obviously, this is a no-brainer -- more than a few angry Saudis don't like the idea of infidels and their massive array of military equipment parked near their holy sites, and the former CIA operative Osama bin Laden has said as much -- but Bill is simply unable to get over it, convinced such a comment is nothing short of treason.

Or a spike in ratings.

It doesn't help that Mr. Alam also writes about "overzealous patriotism that often dominates political discourse in the United States," for instance Bill O'Reilly and the list of far right-wing luminaries mentioned above who dominate the corporate media, to name but a few.
Alam, as well, often takes to task the dearly held right-winger ideal of American exceptionalism, i.e., America is the "Greatest Nation on Earth," an idea that rankles many of the 6 billion or so people on the planet who don't happen to be American -- a growing number of whom, according to polls, feel that America and Israel are the most dangerous threat to world peace.

But then, I guess, there are a few billion or so "Hate-America neurotics" out there.

At any rate, I am not only proud to be a Cockburn Cockroach -- in good company with Shahid Alam, Carolyn Baker, Joshua Frank, Nate Collins, and Mickey Z -- but I also know these folks are absolutely correct in their well-reasoned claims America has more than a few problems in need of address immediately, lest the ChronWatch crazies and their delusional allies, spiraling all the way up to the White House and the Pentagon, destroy this nation with their mindless blood-lust for generational war against Muslim hobgoblins and thus unleash further their pathologically overwhelming desire to find enemies and persecute them relentlessly.

In the meantime, Mr. Plaut, you can call me Cucaracha.

Kurt Nimmo is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/ . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.

He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com



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