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Today's
Stories
December
10, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
From Haiti to Iraq: Burying Water
December
9, 2004
Greg
Moses
Ask Not Who Bankrolled Fallujah
Joshua
Frank
Cobb and the Ohio Recount: Vote Fraud as Fundraiser!
Ralph
Nader
An Open Letter to Bush: It's Time to
Disclose the Real Casualty Figures
Lee
Sustar
Bhopal: the Making of a Disaster
Tom
Barry
Restrictionist Resurgence
Mickey
Z.
Sander Hicks and the 9/11 Truth Movement
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush in the Bubble
Mark
Donham
Why are House Democrats Trying to
Deny Cynthia McKinney Seniority?
Gary
Corseri
On the Anniversary of John Lennon's Death, 2012
Paul
de Rooij
The Voices of Sharon's Little Helpers
December
8, 2004
Ralph
Nader
Will the Real Michael Moore Ever Re-Emerge?
Ann
Harrison
The Ohio Recount: Reluctant Officials
and Few Rules
Paul
Craig Roberts
War Crime
Dave
Lindorff
They've Got a Secret: Inside the $40 Billion Black Budget for
Spying
Patrick
Cockburn / Andrew Buncombe
CIA Warning on Iraq: Fallujah Did Not Break the Back of the Insurgency
Col.
Dan Smith
Rules of Engagement in Iraq
Emily
Alves / Michael Johnson
Paradise Lost: Corruption and Clientelism in Costa Rica
Richard
Oxman
The Dylan Bob Wouldn't Mention: Up With Dylan Thomas
Ron
Jacobs
In Fallujah, Freedom Isn't Free
December
7, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Running Battles in Baghdad
Behrooz
Ghamari
Lost Muslim Voices of Dissent
Dave
Lindorff
American Fantasies: Psst! Hey Buddy,
Did You Hear How Well the War's Going?
Joshua
Frank
Dean at the DNC?
Richard
Oxman
Down with Dylan: the Insufferable Interview
Ray
McGovern
All Mosquitoes, No Swamp
John
Chuckman
The Invasion of Hallifax: The Imperial Wizard Visits Canada
James
Petras
Latin America: the Empire Changes Gears
Website
of the Day
ToxMap: Who's Poisoning You
December
6, 2004
Paul
Craig Roberts
Paranoia and Pre-emption: Is the
Bush Administration Certifiable?
December
4 / 6, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Politicize the CIA? You've Got to
be Kidding
Joe
Bageant
Dining with the Rhinos
Alan
Maass
Reporting from the Ground in Iraq: an Interview with Patrick
Cockburn
Brian
Cloughley
Democracy, Bush-style, in the Gulf
Laura
Carlsen
Latin America Shifts Left
Lenni
Brenner
Jefferson, Madison, Bush and Religion
Anna
Ioakimedes
Brazil's Haitian Mission: Doing God's Work or Washington's?
Uri
Avnery
Widow of Opportunity?
Fred
Gardner
Supreme Court Hears Medical Pot Case
Dave
Zirin
Steroids to Heaven
Jackie
Corr
Mining Camp Blues: the Red State Variation
Don
Fitz
Will Greens Abandon IRV?
Lucy
Herschel
"Art can be a Weapon of the Oppressed": an Interview
with Artist Anthony Papa
Richard
Oxman
No Angels in America: Bashing the Gay Play
Ron
Jacobs
Holiday Greeting Card
Poets'
Basement
Collins, Albert, LaMorticella
December
3, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Lie Then Escalate
Ben
Tripp
Fun With Boycotts: How to Shop in a
Time of Crisis
Joe
Allen
Murder in El Salvador: the Assassination of Teamster Organizer
Gilberto Soto
Matthew
B. Riley
Human Rights Court Fails Lori Berenson
Meir
Shalev
In the End, It is the Violin that Wins
Bob
Wing
The White Elephant in the Room: Race and Election 2004
Christopher
Brauchli
When McCain Bit His Tongue
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
The EU, the US, Israel and Iran
December
2, 2004
Tito
Tricot
No Justice in Chile: I'm a Torture
Survivor in a Country Where Torturers Still Run Free
Behzad
Yaghmaian
The Murder of Theo Van Gogh and Muslim Migration
Dr.
Susan Block
Lana and Me: Meetings with Remarkable Apes
Frank
/ Chowkwanyun
Liberalism and Its Bounds
Lee
Sustar
Standoff in Ukraine: the Bad v. the Corrupt
Patrick
Cockburn
Another Grim Record in Iraq
Mark
Engler
Seattle at Five
Michael
Donnelly
Something Stinks in South Bend: the Firing of Tyrone Willingham
Nate
Collins
The Bay Area Mall on an Ohlone Burial Grounds
Saul
Landau
The Assassination of Danilo Anderson
December
1, 2004
Phillip
Cryan
Associated with Whom? Rightist Bias
in Wire Coverage of Colombia
Dave
Zirin
What's the Matter with "Leon"?:
Budweiser's Racist Commercial
Ghali
Hassan
Iraq's Health Care Under the Occupation:
200 Children Die Every Day
Donna
J. Volatile
Beware Western Nations Threatening "Democracy"
Patrick
Cockburn
How Saddam Tried to Arm the Insurgency
Nick
Meo
Chemical War Over Afghanistan
Mike
Ferner
The Battle of Toledo
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Shame and Determination on Global AIDS Day: 40 Million and Rising
Kathy
Kelly
Looking the Other Way: the Real Crimes
of the UN in Iraq
November
30, 2004
Jennifer
Van Bergen
The Veil of Secrecy
Toni
Nelson Herrera
Meeting Kurtz: When Art is a Crime
Paul
Craig Roberts
The Bush Delusions: Successful at Incompetence
Patrick
Cockburn
The Insurgency Strikes Back: There Are No Safe Havens in Iraq
Chuck
Munson
WTO Protests Five Years Later: Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization
Movement
Adam
Williams
Citizenship Sold: Back to Business in Indiana
Gregory
Elich
A Dangerous Turn in the US Plans for
North Korea
Website
of the Day
Read Lynne Cheney's Lesbian Novel Online!
November
29, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Blowback in Ukraine: The Hand of
the CIA?
Omar
Barghouti
"The Pianist" of Palestine:
Roadblock Concerto at Gunpoint
Mike
Whitney
The US Media and Fallujah: How to
Market a Siege
Uri
Avnery
The Abu Mazen Style: "Give Me
Some Credit!"
Matt
Vidal
Globalization and Economic Inequality: a Look at the Numbers
Patrick
Cockburn
An Interview with Iraq's Foreign
Minister
Alan
Farago
Sex Change and Salvation: God, Girly Men and Endocrine Disrupters
Justin
Huggler
Bhopal 20 Years Later
Antony
Loewenstein
How Australia Reported Arafat's Death and Legacy
Gary
Leupp
Ukraine: Poll Results Aren't the Real
Issue
Website
of the Day
Mosul: Images from a Kill Zone
November
27 / 28, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Torture & Neo-Liberalism with
Sycorax in Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
What Happened to O'Reilly's Loofa?
Fred
Gardner
Ashcroft v. Raich: Medical Marijuana and the Supreme Court
Kathy
Kelly
What We Can Control
Diane
Christian
The Other Cheek: "Empire Doesn't Analyze, It Acts"
Gary
Leupp
One More Neocon Target: South (Yes, South) Korea
Lenni
Brenner
Equality and Rights of Return: Jefferson Instructs the New York
Times
Ron
Jacobs
Death Squads and Iraq's Elections: the Mysterious Murders of
the AMS Clerics
Joshua
Frank
An Interview with Kevin Zeese on Nader, Kerry and the ABB Crowd
Toni
Solo
The Murder of Danilo Anderson
Saul
Landau
Fallujah, the 21st Century Guernica
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Matthew Shepard Case 6 Years Later: Why Hate Crimes Laws are
No Cure for Homophobia
Justin
Taylor
Empire's Lawless Opportunities
Amos
Harel
The Case of Captain R.
Walter
A. Davis
Tabloid Justice
Stephen
Hendricks
God's Kind of Men
Poets'
Basement
Albert, LaMorticella and Ford
November
26, 2004
Peter
Feng
Gavin Newsom: Man or Machine?
Greg
Moses
It's the White Vote, Stupid
Liaquat
Ali Khan
The Devil's Work: Bush's Minority Appointments
Michael
Mandel / Gail Davidson
Why Bush Should Be Banned from Canada: a Memo to the Ministry
of Immigration
Dave
Lindorff
Nation of Sheep, Turkey of an Election: Urkrainians Show the
Way
Gary
Corseri
When Black Friday Comes...
Paul
Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Conservatives?
Website
of the Day
Iraq Pipeline Watch
November
25, 2004
Willliam
Loren Katz
Giving Thanks to Whom?: "Thanks
to God We Sent 600 Heathen Souls to Hell Today"
Mitchel
Cohen
Why I Hate Thanksgiving
Mike
Ferner
An Uncommon Mom
November
24, 2004
Gila
Svirsky
License to Kill: the Example of Violence
is Set by the State
Winslow
T. Wheeler
The
Other Mess in Congress
Christopher
Brauchli
The Company He Keeps: the Syndicate of Tom Delay
Dave
Lindorff
Double Standards on Exit Polls: Hypocrisy Sans Irony
Ron
Jacobs
The Occupation of Iraq is the Root of t he Problem
Ken
Sengupta
Witnesses: War Crimes in Fallujah
Diana
Barahona
The Final Holocaust or Why I Voted for Ralph Nader
John
L. Hess
Safire the Shameless
Jason
Leopold
Did Harvard Hire (Another) War Criminal?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Mark of McCain: the Senator Most Likely to Start a Nuclear
War
Map
of the Day
Now and Then: 2004 v. 1860
November
23, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
Bush and Uribe at the Beach
November
22, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Fight Night in the NBA: Selective Outrage
in Detroit
Paul
Craig Roberts
On to Iran: We Won't Get Fooled Again?
Michael
Mandel / Gail Davidson
Why Bush Should be Banned from Canada
Kathie
Helmkamp
Our Son: a Marine Who Won't Kill
Ken
Sengupta
The Triangle of Death: "This is Now the Most Dangerous Place
in Iraq"
Mike
Whitney
Greenspan's Hammer
Roger
Burbach
Why They Hate Bush in Chile
Website
of the Day
Fed Up with Government Lies and Corporate Spin?
November
20 / 21, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Poisoned Chalice
Todd
May
Religion, the Election and the Politics of Fear
Abbas
Ahmed Ibrahim
The Horrors of Fallujah: a First-Hand Account
Kevin
Zeese
Mishandling Nader
Landau
/ Hassen
After Arafat
Tom
Barry
The Vulcans Consolidate Power: The Rise of Stephen Hadley
Fred
Gardner
Pot Shots: Ask Dr. Todd
Justin
E.H. Smith
Triumph of the Will: the Sequel
Carl
Estabrook
Where We Are Now
Gary
Leupp
Imperial History-Making vs. Reality-Based Thought: a Dialogue
Dave
Lindorff
Apocalypse Soon
Jenna
Michelle Liut
Plans Colombia and Patriota: Wanton Wastes of Money, Manpower
and Lives
Mickey
Z.
The Granma Moses of Radical Writing: an Interview with William
Blum
Greg
Moses
The Same Old Struggle Against Imperial America
Sharon
Smith
Abortion Rights and the Election: What Now?
Ron
Jacobs
Sandwiches and Car Bombs
Ben
Tripp
Raising d'Etre: Finding Money in Hollywood These Days
Richard
Oxman
Basketbrawl Two Pointer: Iraq Rules!
Gilad
Atzmon
Politics and Jazz
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Albert, Ford, & Anon.
Website
of the Day
Voice of the Forest
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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Weekend Edition
December 11 / 12, 2004
Return to Kosovo
Calling
the Humanitarian Bombers to Account
By
JOHN PILGER
Muted by the evidence of the Anglo-American
catastrophe in Iraq, the international "humanitarian"
war party ought to be called to account for its largely forgotten
crusade in Kosovo, the model for Tony Blair's "onward march
of liberation." Just as Iraq is being torn apart by the
forces of empire, so was Yugoslavia, the multi-ethnic state that
uniquely rejected both sides in the cold war.
Lies as great as those of Bush
and Blair were deployed by Clinton and Blair in their grooming
of public opinion for an illegal, unprovoked attack on a European
country. Like the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, the media
coverage in the spring of 1999 was a series of fraudulent justifications,
beginning with U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen's claim that
"we've now seen about 100,000 military-aged [Albanian] men
missing ... they may have been murdered." David Scheffer,
the U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes, announced that as
many as "225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and
59" may have been killed. Blair invoked the Holocaust and
"the spirit of the Second World War." The British press
took its cue. "Flight from genocide," said the Daily
Mail. "Echoes of the Holocaust," chorused the Sun and
the Mirror.
By June 1999, with the bombardment
over, international forensic teams began subjecting Kosovo to
minute examination. The American FBI arrived to investigate what
was called "the largest crime scene in the FBI's forensic
history." Several weeks later, having not found a single
mass grave, the FBI went home. The Spanish forensic team also
returned home, its leader complaining angrily that he and his
colleagues had become part of "a semantic pirouette by the
war propaganda machines, because we did not find one not
one mass grave."
In November 1999, the Wall
Street Journal published the results of its own investigation,
dismissing "the mass-grave obsession." Instead of "the
huge killing fields some investigators were led to expect ...
the pattern is of scattered killings [mostly] in areas where
the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army had been active."
The Journal concluded that NATO stepped up its claims about Serb
killing fields when it "saw a fatigued press corps drifting
toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO's bombs...."
The war in Kosovo was "cruel, bitter, savage; genocide it
wasn't."
One year later, the International
War Crimes Tribunal, a body effectively set up by NATO, announced
that the final count of bodies found in Kosovo's "mass graves"
was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides and Serbs and
Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army. Like Iraq's
fabled weapons of mass destruction, the figures used by the U.S.
and British governments and echoed by journalists were inventions
along with Serb "rape camps" and Clinton's and
Blair's claims that NATO never deliberately bombed civilians.
Code-named "Stage Three,"
NATO's civilian targets included public transport, hospitals,
schools, museums, churches. "It was common knowledge that
NATO went to Stage Three [after a couple of weeks]," said
James Bissell, the Canadian ambassador in Belgrade during the
attack. "Otherwise, they would not have been bombing bridges
on Sunday afternoons and market places."
NATO's clients were the Kosovo
Liberation Army. Seven years earlier, the KLA had been designated
by the State Department as a terrorist organization in league
with al-Qaeda. KLA thugs were feted; Foreign Secretary Robin
Cook allowed them to call him on his mobile phone. "The
Kosovo-Albanians played us like a Stradivarius," wrote the
UN Balkans commander, Major-General Lewis MacKenzie, last April.
"We have subsidized and indirectly supported their violent
campaign for an ethnically pure Kosovo. We have never blamed
them for being the perpetrators of the violence in the early
1990s, and we continue to portray them as the designated victim
today in spite of evidence to the contrary."
The trigger for the bombing
of Yugoslavia was, according to NATO, the failure of the Serbian
delegation to sign up to the Rambouillet peace conference. What
went mostly unreported was that the Rambouillet accord had a
secret Annex B, which Madeleine Albright's delegation had inserted
on the last day. This demanded the military occupation of the
whole of Yugoslavia, a country with bitter memories of the Nazi
occupation. As the Foreign Office minister Lord Gilbert later
conceded to a Commons' defense select committee, Annex B was
planted deliberately to provoke rejection by the government in
Belgrade. As the first bombs fell, the elected parliament in
Belgrade, which included some of Milosevic's fiercest opponents,
voted overwhelmingly to reject it.
Equally revealing was a chapter
dealing exclusively with the Kosovo economy. This called for
a "free-market economy" and the privatization of all
government assets. As the Balkans writer Neil Clark has pointed
out, "the rump of Yugoslavia ... was the last economy in
central-southern Europe to be uncolonized by western capital.
'Socially owned enterprises,' the form of worker self-management
pioneered under Tito, still predominated. Yugoslavia had publicly
owned petroleum, mining, car, and tobacco industries, and 75
percent of industry was state- or socially owned."
At the Davos summit of neo-liberal
chieftains in 1999, Blair berated Belgrade, not for its handling
of Kosovo, but for its failure to fully embrace "economic
reform." In the bombing campaign that followed, it was state-owned
companies, rather than military sites, that were targeted. NATO's
destruction of only 14 Yugoslav army tanks compares with its
bombing of 372 centers of industry, including the Zastava car
factory, leaving hundreds of thousands jobless. "Not one
foreign or privately owned factory was bombed," wrote Clark.
Erected on the foundation of
this massive lie, Kosovo today is a violent, criminalized UN-administered
"free market" in drugs and prostitution. More than
200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosnians, Turks, Croats, and Jews have been
ethnically cleansed by the KLA with NATO forces standing by.
KLA hit squads have burned, looted, or demolished 85 Orthodox
churches and monasteries, according to the UN. The courts are
venal. "You shot an 89-year-old Serb grandmother?"
mocked a UN narcotics officer. "Good for you. Get out of
jail."
Although Security Council Resolution
1244 recognizes Kosovo as an integral part of Yugoslavia, and
does not authorize the UN administration to sell off anything,
multinational companies are being offered 10- and 15-year leases
of the province's local industries and resources, including the
vast Trepca mines, some of the richest mineral deposits in the
world. After Hitler captured them in 1940, the mines supplied
German munition factories with 40 percent of their lead. Overseeing
this plundered, murderous, now almost ethnically pure "future
democracy" (Blair), are 4,000 American troops in Camp Bondsteel,
a 775-acre permanent base.
Meanwhile, the trial of Milosevic
proceeds as farce, not unlike an earlier show trial in The Hague:
that of the Libyans blamed for the Lockerbie bomb. Milosevic
was a brute; he was also a banker once regarded as the West's
man who was prepared to implement "economic reforms"
in keeping with IMF, World Bank, and European Community demands;
to his cost, he refused to surrender sovereignty. The empire
expects nothing less.
John Pilger was
born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He has been a war correspondent,
filmmaker and playwright. Based in London, he has written from
many countries and has twice won British journalism's highest
award, that of "Journalist of the Year," for his work
in Vietnam and Cambodia. His new book, Tell
Me No Lies: Investigative Journalism and Its Triumphs, is
published by Jonathan Cape next month. He can be reached through
his website: http://www.johnpilger.com/
© John Pilger
2004
Weekend Edition
Features for November
27 / 28, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Torture & Neo-Liberalism with
Sycorax in Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
What Happened to O'Reilly's Loofa?
Fred
Gardner
Ashcroft v. Raich: Medical Marijuana and the Supreme Court
Kathy
Kelly
What We Can Control
Diane
Christian
The Other Cheek: "Empire Doesn't Analyze, It Acts"
Gary
Leupp
One More Neocon Target: South (Yes, South) Korea
Lenni
Brenner
Equality and Rights of Return: Jefferson Instructs the New York
Times
Ron
Jacobs
Death Squads and Iraq's Elections: the Mysterious Murders of
the AMS Clerics
Joshua
Frank
An Interview with Kevin Zeese on Nader, Kerry and the ABB Crowd
Toni
Solo
The Murder of Danilo Anderson
Saul
Landau
Fallujah, the 21st Century Guernica
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Matthew Shepard Case 6 Years Later: Why Hate Crimes Laws are
No Cure for Homophobia
Justin
Taylor
Empire's Lawless Opportunities
Amos
Harel
The Case of Captain R.
Walter
A. Davis
Tabloid Justice
Stephen
Hendricks
God's Kind of Men
Poets'
Basement
Albert, LaMorticella and Ford
|