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March
12, 2002
Wole Akande
US
is Being Discredited
in the Eyes of Africa
March
11, 2002
Dave Marsh
10
CDs Playing On My Desk
John Chuckman
Footprints
in the Dust
Norman
Madarasz
Max
Steel in a Time Chaos
March
10, 2002
Thomas
Croft
Year
of Living Dangerously
March
9, 2002
Bill Cook
Sharon's
Bulldozer
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Nightmare in Israel
March
8, 2002
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
When
Business Men
Make Boo-Boos
CounterPunch
Exclusive
Enron's
Spooky
Image Consultant
Rep. Ron
Paul
Stop
the War on Colombia
Andre
Achong
The
Failed War on Drugs
John B.
Kelly
Michael
Moore and Me:
Disability Rights and
a Big Stupid White Guy
March
7, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Congressman
McInnis Equates Enviros to al-Qaeda
Mike Rogers
Will
the Battle of Shah-i-Kot Become the Taliban's Alamo
Walt Brasch
Patriot
Act and Free Speech
John Jonik
Insurance
Scams:
Who Are the Scofflaws?
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Bumper
Crop: The Politics
of Afghan Opium
March
6, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
A
Beautiful Mind:
Another Dangerous Lie?
Tom Turnipseed
War
Is Wrong
David
Vest
Billy
Graham and Nixon:
Tangled Up in Tape
Patrick
Cockburn
The
Bombings That
Made Putin a Hero
CounterPunch
Wire
Berezovsky
Fingers Putin
in Bombings
Edward
Said
Thoughts
About America
March
5, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
Ann
Coulter At It Again:
Race-Baiting Norm Mineta
Bill Christison
A
Former CIA Officer
Explains Why the War
on Terror Won't Work
Delkhasteh and Wright
What
Should We be Fighting For? An Open Letter
to Pro-War Academics
Mariya
Tsvekova
Putin's
Georgian Gambit
March
4, 2002
Ralph
Nader
Dick
Cheney: A Dinosaur
in the Age of Mammals
Uri Avnery
How
Israel Will Torpedo
the Saudi Peace Plan
Southern
/ Kubrick
Stangelove
Scenario
for Shadow Govt. Bunker
David
Vest
Grammy's
of Constant Sorrow
March
3, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
War
on Terrorism for Dummies
Paul Cox
Boycott
Mel Gibson's
"We Were Soldiers"
Frederick
Hudson
Toward
a Nonviolent Africa:
Bill Sutherland's Quest
Eric Schaeffer
Dear
Christie Whitman:
Take This Job and Shove It
John Chuckman
Why
the Rest of Planet is Unnerved by America
March
2, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Sweat,
Sex, Feet and
the Working Class
March
1, 2002
Brendan
Sexton III
What's
Wrong With Black Hawk Down: an Actor Speaks Out
David
Krieger
Nuclear
Terrorism
and US Nuclear Policy
February
28, 2002
James
T. Phillips
Baghdad,
Spring 1992
Gideon
Samet
Sharon
Must Go
Rep. Ron
Paul
Before
We Bomb Iraq
M. Shahid
Alam
Samuel
Huntington:
Peddling Civilizational Wars
St. Clair
/ Cockburn
Rumble
from the Jungle:
Ecuadorian Farmers Fight
DynCorp's ChemWar
February
27, 2002
Eric Hobsbawm
The
Future of War and Peace
John Troyer
About
that WTC Memorial
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Wired
for Democracy
or Business?
Alexander
Cockburn
Daniel
Pearl: Should His
Editors Have Sent Him There?
February
26, 2002
Jonathan
Steele
Kabul's
Loss
Vasily
Streltsov
The
Pentagon in
the Transcaucusas
CounterPunch
Wire
How
Corporations Use Shadowy "527" Groups to Influence
Politicians
Lt. Col.
Robert Bowman
ABM
Treaty: Alive or Dead?
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
A
Prayer for America
February
25, 2002
John Clarke
Interrogated
at US Border
Blankfort,
Poirier, Zeltzer
ADL
Blinks, Settles Spying Case
Alex Lynch
Naked
from Sin:
The Ordeal of Nahla
and Sami Al-Arian
John Chuckman
Ashcroft
Speaks in Tongues
February
24, 2002
David
Vest
Skate
Date
February
23, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Axis
of Evil and
Media Monopolies
Bahour/Dahan
Cracks
in the Occupation
February
22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
Axel
of Evil: Sex Crimes
and the Constitution
February
21, 2002
Gary Leupp
The
Philippines: Second Front in US's Global War
David
Vest
Reagan
Clone Project?
Mokhiber
and Weissman
Chicago
School and Corporate America: Rotten to the Core
February
20, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
The
Shallow Throat Document
Kay Lee
The
Prison Guard Who Never Owned Up to His Crimes
February
19, 2002
David
Orr
Waylon
Jennings, the Duke,
and the Navajo
John Chuckman
The
Devil and Georgie Bush
Prudence
Crowther
Giblet
Gravitas
Ramzi
Kysia
Caught
in the Iraq DMZ
February
18, 2002
Ron Jacobs
The
US and Iran
George
Lewandowski
Empire
in Declline
Lenni
Brenner
Life
and Death of a Folk Hero
February
17, 2002
Robert
Fisk
Lost
in a Pit of Desperation
February
16, 2002
Phillip
Cryan
Colombia
in War Time
February
15, 2002
C.G. Estabrook
From
New York to Porto Alegre
Robert
O'Brien
The
View from Porto Alegre
Mokhiber/Weissman
Resisting
the Assassins
February
14, 2002
Levy and
Easton
Ante
Pavelic
Real Butcher of the Balkans
Joan Claybrook
Dear
Jeb Bush,
About You and Enron
John Chuckman
Time
for a Woman Prez
Alexander
Cockburn
Banning
the Koran
February
13, 2002
Sen. Russ
Feingold
War
Powers and
the War on Terror
Tom Turnipseed
Bush's
Folly
George
Monbiot
American
Imperialism
February
12, 2002
Uri Avnery
The
Great Game:
Oil, Sharon and Iran
Tommy
Ates
Black
Land Loss
February
11, 2002
Walt Brasch
The
Synergizing of America
John Troyer
Enron's
Deep Throat?
February
9, 2002
John Blair
Criticize
Cheney, Go to Jail
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
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War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
Read Whiteout and Find Out
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 New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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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March 12, 2002
Public Diplomacy?
Contra Warrior Otto Reich Returns
to the State Department
By John Patrick Leary
Another seminal figure from one of the most troubling
episodes in the United States' recent history has been quietly
restored to his old stomping grounds. Otto Reich, like Elliot
Abrams and John Negroponte one of the officials most responsible
for devising and administering the destructive "Reagan doctrine"
in 1980s Central America, has been given a top job in the Bush
administration. The former head of a pro-Contra government office,
Reich was named Assistant Secretary of State for the Western
Hemisphere during the February Senate recess.
Elliot Abrams, the conservative State
Department official who during the 1980s regularly misled Congress
and the public about the abuses of the U.S.-supported Salvadoran
dictatorship, was later pardoned by the elder George Bush before
standing trial for his role in the Iran-Contra affair. His son
rewarded Abrams with a top White House job last year. In 1981,
when the U.S. ambassador to Honduras complained about human rights
abuses by the Honduran military regime (which the U.S. was supporting),
Reagan promptly removed him and replaced him with yes-man Negroponte.
He is now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
Lastly, there is the Cuban-born Reich,
who was first nominated for his new position last March. During
the Reagan administration, Reich led a murky interagency outfit
called the Office of Public Diplomacy for Latin America and the
Caribbean, an obfuscatory bit of official nomenclature which,
like the German Democratic Republic or "military intelligence,"
is something of a paradox, as Reich's office was, in fact, neither
public nor diplomatic.
The organization, which was declared
illegal after a 1987 investigation by the U.S. Comptroller General,
was charged with disseminating what it called "White Propaganda"-covert
misinformation designed to influence public opinion in favor
of Reagan's military campaign against Nicaragua's Sandinista
government and other leftist groups in the region. (This is,
of course, exactly the work currently handled by the Pentagon's
Office of Strategic Influence, the subject of much recent controversy.)
For starters, Reich's office drafted
pro-Reagan op-ed pieces that ran under fabricated bylines; White
House statements supposedly written by American university professors
and Nicaraguan Contras thus made their way into U.S. newspapers
(Reich himself reportedly liked to refer to National Public Radio
as "Moscow on the Potomac").
More mundanely, the office regularly
planted stories designed to embarrass or contradict the Sandinista
regime. After distributing one secret Nicaraguan government communication,
a smug OPD official wrote his White House colleague Pat Buchanan
in a memo: "Do not be surprised if this cable somehow hits
the evening news." But manipulating the press was not the
only trick up the OPD's sleeve; the Comptroller General's report
also indicates that the office supplied "a great deal"
of information to pro-Reagan lobbying groups and political organizations
that favored the Contra war.
For a president whose campaign promised
to restore candor and diplomacy to official Washington, the ex-director
of an outlawed propaganda office seems a puzzling choice indeed
for one of the government's most important posts in Latin American
affairs.
Furthermore, at a time when our government
is engaged in a righteous "war against terrorism,"
it is notable that Bush has chosen to reinstate a central figure
from a time when the U.S. armed, funded, and trained a right-wing
landowner's militia that it called an army of "freedom fighters,"
which amounted to a distinction of more than just semantics.
Bush deliberately appointed Reich during
the February Senate recess, and so he will assume his post without
the confirmation hearings that are customary for a job of this
importance. Legislators like Joseph Biden (D-DE), the chair of
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that will not hold hearings
on this appointment, quietly expressed their displeasure with
Bush's tactics.
The president has made much of his desire
to forge a new relationship with Latin America based on mutual
cooperation and "openness," economic and otherwise.
The return of old Reagan Contra-warriors like Abrams, Negroponte,
and Reich--not to mention outfits like the Office of Strategic
Influence--do more than just summon old grudges and sad memories.
The US right has recently begun clamoring for intervention in
Colombia's civil war, where death squads and a corrupt military--frequently
acting together for what Eduardo Galeano aptly termed the Colombian
"democratorship"--combat two aging insurgencies.
Recast as a theater in the new "war
on terrorism," the Colombian civil war reminds us instead
that the horrors of torture and war--and the more massive scourges
of poverty, illiteracy, and inequality--have not left the hemisphere
that gave the English language a dreadful word, "the disappeared."
Bush's move to circumvent the confirmation
process in appointing the ex-propagandist Reich recalls that
more contentious time in U.S. relations with Latin America, when
secrecy, expediency, and inept self-interest were far more familiar
than any "public diplomacy."
John Patrick Leary lives in New York City. He can be reached at:
johnpatrickleary@yahoo.com
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