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Today's
Stories
January 24/5, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10, Morris
0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's Revelations
and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the Mafia
January
21, 2004
Mazin
Qumsiyeh
Spring in Palestine
Ron
Jacobs
Drive, He Said
Dave Lindorff
Iraq Election Blowback
January 20, 2004
Stan
Goff
State of the Union, MLK and 30 mm DU: Another
Embittered Rant by a Former Soldier
Dave Louthan
Inside the Mad Cow Plant: a Worker Speaks
Out
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Havoc in the Cornfields
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti--Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A
Visit to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil--Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How
2004 Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
January 12, 2004
Ben Tripp
No
Stan for the Kurds
Norman Solomon
The
Dixie Trap: Democrats and the South
Mike Whitney
O'Neill's Revenge
Jason Leopold
From the Very First Instant It Was About Iraq
Uri Avnery
Syria's
Peace Proposal
January 10 / 11, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Bush
as Hitler? Let's Be Fair
Susan Davis
Dangerous Books
Diane Christian
On Lying and Colin Powell
Lisa Viscidi
Exhumations: Unearthing Guatemala's Macabre Past
Daniel Estulin
Destroying History in Iraq
Saul Landau
Homeland Anxiety
Elaine Cassel
Who's Winning the War on Civil Liberties?
Bruce Jackson
Making the Shit List
Christopher Brauchli
Baptizing Hitler's Ghost
Francis A. Boyle
The Deep Scars of War
Lee Ballinger
Cold Sweat: Sweatshops and the Music Industry
Patrick W. Gavin
Hillary's Slur: Mrs. Lott?
Ramzy Baroud
What Invaders Have in Common
Michael Schwartz
Inside the California Grocery Strike
Gary Johnson
An Interview with Former Heavyweight Champ Greg Page
Dave Zirin
An Interview with Marvin Miller on Unions and Baseball
Mark Hand
A Review of Resistance: My Life for Lebanon
Poets' Basement
Thomas, Daley, Curtis, Guthrie and Albert
January 9, 2004
David Lindorff
The
Misers of War: Troop Strength and Chintzy Bonuses
Kurt Nimmo
Saddam's Defense: Summon Bush Sr. to the Stand
Mike Whitney
Orange Jumpsuits for the Bush Clan?: The Carnegie Report on Iraq's Non--existent
WMDs
Deb Reich
Palestinians and Israelis: This War is Unwinnable
David Vest
Disabled
Vets Fire Back at Rumsfeld
January 8, 2004
Neve Gordon
Israeli
Refuseniks Sentenced to Jail
Lenni Brenner
Dr.
Dean and the Godhead
Ray McGovern
Bush: Driving Without Breaks
Mark Scaramella
Inside
the DA's Office: Lies, Errors and Tedium
Yves Engler
Bush's Mexican Gambit
James Hollander
Journalists
Under Fire: the Death of José Couso in Baghdad
January 7, 2004
Democracy Now!
Uncharitable
Care: How Hospitals are Gouging and Even Arresting the Uninsured
Greg Weiher
The
Bush Administration's Ongoing Intelligence Problem
Ben Tripp
The Word of the Year, 2003
Dave Lindorff
Dean and His Democratic Detractors
Michael Leon
The NYT Does Chomsky
Bob Boldt
God Talk
Ramon Ryan
Small
Victories and Long Struggles: the 10th Anniversary of the Zapatista
Uprising
January 6, 2004
Dave Lindorff
RNC
Plays the Hitler Card: MoveOn Shouldn't Apologize for Those Ads
Ron Jacobs
Drugs
in Uniform: Hashish and the War on Terrorism
Josh Frank
Coffee and State Authority in Colombia
Doug Giebel
Permanent Bases: Leave Iraq? Hell No, We Won't Go
John Chuckman
Sick Puppies: David Frum's New Neo--Con Manifesto
Rannie Amiri
The Politics of the Iranian Earthquake
John L. Hess
A
Record to Dissent From
Thacher Schmid
A Cheesehead's Musings on the Sunday NYT
David Price
"Like
Slaves": Anthropological Thoughts on Occupation
January 5, 2004
Al Krebs
How
Now Mad Cow!
Kathy Kelly
Squatting
in Baghdad's Bomb Craters
Jordy Cummings
The Dialectic of the Kristol Family: Putting the Neo in the Cons
Fran Shor
Mad Human Disease: Chewing the Fat Down on the Farm
Fidel Castro
"We Shall Overcome": On the 45th Anniversary of the Cuban
Revolution
Gary Leupp
North
Korea for Dummies
January 3 / 4, 2004
Brian Cloughley
Never
Mind the WMDs, Just Look at History
Vice Admiral Jack Shanahan
The Wrong War at the Wrong Time
William Cook
Failing to Respond to 9/11
Glen Martin
Jesus
vs. the Beast of the Apocalypse
Robert Fisk
Iraqi Humor Amid the Carnage
Ilan Pappe
The Geneva Bubble
Walter Davis
Robert Jay Lifton, or Nostalgia
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft vs. the Left
Mike Whitney
The Padilla Case
Steven Sherman
On Wallerstein's The Decline of American Power
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Taiwan Hypocrisy
William Blum
Codework Orange!
Mitchel Cohen
Learning from Che Guevara
Seth Sandronsky
Mad Cow and Main Street USA
Bruce Jackson
Conversations with Leslie Fiedler
Standard Schaefer
Poet Carl Rakosi Turns 100
Ron Jacobs
Sir Mick
Adam Engel
Hall of Hoaxes
Poets' Basement
Jones, Albert & Curtis
January 2, 2004
Stan Cox
Red
Alert 2016
Dave Lindorff
Beef, the Meat of Republicans
Jackie Corr
Rule and Ruin: Wall Street and Montana
Norman Solomon
George Will's Ethics: None of Our Business?
David Vest
As the Top Wobbleth
January 1, 2004
Randall Robinson
Honor
Haiti, Honor Ourselves
David Krieger
Looking
Back on 2003
Robert Fisk
War Takes an Inhuman Twist: Roadkill Bombs
Stan Goff
War,
Race and Elections
Hammond Guthrie
2003 Almaniac
Website of the Day
Embody Bags
December 31, 2003
Ray McGovern
Don't
Be Fooled Again: This Isn't an Independent Investigation
Kurt Nimmo
Manufacturing Hysteria
Robert Fisk
The Occupation is Damned
Mike Whitney
Mad Cows and Downer George
Alexander Cockburn
A Great Year Ebbed, Another Ahead
December 30, 2003
Michael Neumann
Criticism
of Israel is Not Anti--Semitism
Annie Higgins
When
They Bombed the Hometown of the Virgin Mary
Alan Farago
Bush Bros. Wrecking Co.: Time Runs Out for the Everglades
Dan Bacher
Creatures from the Blacklight Lagoon: From Glofish to Frankenfish
Jeffrey St. Clair
Hard
Time on the Killing Floor: Inside Big Meat
Willie Nelson
Whatever Happened to Peace on Earth?
December 29, 2003
Mark Hand
The
Washington Post in the Dock?
David Lindorff
The
Bush Election Strategy
Phillip Cryan
Interested Blindness: Media Omissions in Colombia's War
Richard Trainor
Catellus Development: the Next Octopus?
Uri Avnery
Israel's
Conscientious Objectors
December 27 / 28, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
A
Journey Into Rupert Murdoch's Soul
Kathy Kelly
Christmas Day in Baghdad: A Better World
Saul Landau
Iraq
at the End of the Year
Dave Zirin
A Linebacker for Peace & Justice: an Interview with David Meggysey
Robert Fisk
Iraq
Through the American Looking Glass
Scott Burchill
The Bad Guys We Once Thought Good: Where Are They Now?
Chris Floyd
Bush's Iraq Plan is Right on Course: Saddam 2.0
Brian J. Foley
Don't Tread on Me: Act Now to Save the Constitution
Seth Sandronsky
Feedlot Sweatshops: Mad Cows and the Market
Susan Davis
Lord
of the (Cash Register) Rings
Ron Jacobs
Cratched Does California
Adam Engel
Crumblecake and Fish
Norman Solomon
The Unpardonable Lenny Bruce
Poets' Basement
Cullen and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Activism Through Music
December 26, 2003
Gary Leupp
Bush
Doings: Doing the Language
December 25, 2003
Diane Christian
The
Christmas Story
Elaine Cassel
This
Christmas, the World is Too Much With Us
Susan Davis
Jinglebells, Hold the Schlock
Kristen Ess
Bethlehem Celebrates Christmas, While Rafah Counts the Dead
Francis Boyle
Oh Little Town of Bethlehem
Alexander Cockburn
The
Magnificient 9
|
Weekend
Edition
January 24 / 5, 2004
Iraq's Shia
"Our
Day Has Come"
By PATRICK COCKBURN
At
the height of the shortage of petrol in Baghdad a month ago people queued
in their cars for as long as 18 hours outside petrol stations. One reason
for the lack of petrol was that much of it was being stolen by black
marketeers.
One
day Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the 73-year-old clerical leader of
the Iraqi Shiah who has not left his modest house in the holy city of
Najaf for a year, sent out an instruction that Shi’ites should
not be involved in the petrol black market.
“It shows the enormous influence of Sistani that you could see
his edict having an immediate effect on the black market in petrol,”
a Shi’ite friend told me, though he added ruefully that Sistani’'s
success showed that most of the black market must be controlled by Shi’ites.
In
the last two weeks the Shi’ites, some 60 per cent of the Iraqi
population, have started to express their frustrations on the street.
Tens of thousands of people have marched through the centre of Basra
and Baghdad to demand fair elections to select a new Iraqi assembly
and government. A yellow flag with a Shi’ite slogan on it now
hangs from the top of the monument which replaced the statue of Saddam
Hussein famously toppled in Baghdad last year.
It
is a critical moment for the US and British venture in Iraq and perhaps
their last chance to conclude it without a political disaster. The US
had promised under an agreement signed last 15 November with the Iraqi
Governing Council, whose members were appointed by the US, to hand over
sovereignty to a new Iraqi government on 1 July.
But
the indirect elections through 18 regional caucuses for the new Iraqi
assembly are a recipe for fraud and manipulation by the Governing Council
and the US-run Coalition Provisional Authority. So far debate had focused
on the practicality of Ayatollah Sistani’s demand for direct one-man,
one- vote election being arranged in time. This has clouded the simple
fact that the caucus system--overseen by committees of US appointed
officials and politicians long in exile -- is so blatantly undemocratic
that it is very unlikely to produce a government deemed legitimate by
the majority of Iraqis.
Tony
Blair'’s office said yesterday that holding direct elections before
July would be ‘difficult’ for technical reasons. By this
stage it may well be true largely because the US has taken no measures
to organise direct elections. The July deadline cannot be moved because
it is four months before the US presidential election. The administration
wants to give the impression to the voters at home that the American
mission in Iraq is near completion.
The
US position in Iraq is very much at the mercy of the Grand Ayatollah.
If he issues a Fatwa denouncing the caucuses and the assembly they select
as illegitimate then no government they choose will last very long.
He has also made clear that only a properly elected government will
have the authority to negotiate an agreement with the US on how long
its troops stay in Iraq.
The
Iraqi Shia feel their day has come. Sistani and the clerical establishment
have said their ancestors made a mistake in supporting the revolt against
the British in 1920. As a result the Sunni Arab community, only some
15 to – 20 per cent of Iraqis, was able to control the country
right up to the fall of Saddam Hussein.
This
is not quite as menacing to the US as it sounds. Sistani and most of
the Shi’ite clergy in Iraq has traditionally disapproved of the
attempt to create theocratic state in Iran. They argue that the clergy
should not directly participate in politics. Sistani has not denounced
the US occupation, though he himself has refused to meet Paul Bremer,
the head of the CPA. He has told his followers to talk to the Americans
but ‘end every conversation by asking the Americans when they
are leaving.’
Part
of Sistani'’s influence comes from the fact he is the most influential
leader of the largest community in Iraq. But it is also because his
views reflect those of so many Iraqis. They were glad to see the back
of Saddam Hussein but do not like the American occupation, regardless
of whether or not it is exercised directly or through a puppet government.
For a country with such a large army in Iraq the US is in a surprisingly
weak position. The guerrilla war in Sunni Muslim areas is not diminishing
despite the capture of Saddam Hussein in December. US commanders say
the number of incidents is down. This shows they are a little out of
touch since American soldiers on the ground quietly admit that they
don’t report many of the attacks on them unless they suffer casualties.
Sistani
has helped the US so far by ensuring that the guerrilla war does not
spread to Shiite areas. He does not want a confrontation with the Americans,
but he does intend to influence them. Demonstrations in favor of elections
were called off in Najaf and other Shiite cities this week because Sistani
felt he had shown the strength of his resolve.
The
irony of the present situation is that the US and British governments
should be moving heaven and earth hold democratic elections. This would
produce an Iraqi assembly and government with real legitimacy with whom
they could deal.
Tony
Blair and his government should be in the forefront in pushing for what
Ali Sistani is demanding. The original justification for Britain going
to war was that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction
and the means to deliver them. This belief has now been thoroughly discredited.
A
second justification for war was that it was to overthrow the evil monster
Saddam Hussein and replace him with a democracy. If the US and Britain
now press ahead with manifestly fraudulent indirect elections then the
second justification for war will turn out to be as much of a fake as
the first.
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