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Today's Stories Febrauary 16, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Their Own Economic Reality February 15, 2006 Brian Conacnnon, Jr. Haiti's Elections: Chaos, Supression and Fraud Dave Lindorff Democrats Shoot Their Own, Too Saree Makdisi Israeli Ultimatums Joshua Frank The Rhetorical Gore Amira Hass Down the Expulsion Highway CounterPunch Wire Winter of Discontent: a 34--Day Fast Against the War Robert Bryce The United States of Enron Website of the Day Osama's Game: an Interview with Michael Scheuer February 14, 2006 John Sugg Those Cartoons and the Neo Con: Daniel Pipes and the Danish Editor Don Santina DiFi and the Royal Democrats: the Curious Withdrawal of Cindy Sheehan William A. Cook Shaming Sharon Ray McGovern Who Will Blow the Whistle About Iran? John Ross Bush's Mexican Poodle Website of the Day Willie Nelson Records CPer Ned Sublette's "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly" February 13, 2006 Lila Rajiva Axis of Child Abusers: UK Troops Beat Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens Christopher Brauchli Whistleblowers and Witch Hunters: the Bush Inquisition Dave Lindorff Deadeye Dick: If Stupidity Were Impeachable, Cheney Would Be History Ron Jacobs Black Liberation Mike Whitney Riding High with Hugo Chavez Michael Neumann Respectful Cultures and Disrespectful Cartoons Website of the Day Virtual Resistance   February 11 / 12, 2006 Alexander Cockburn How Not to Spot a Terrorist Ralph Nader Bringing Democracy to the Federal Reserve Paul Craig Roberts Nuking the Economy Pat Williams John Boehner's Dirty Little Secret: Flying Lobbyist Air at $4,000 a Junket Fred Gardner Dr. Mikuriya's Appeal: a Last Minute Twist Saul Landau From Munich to Hamas John Chuckman Cartoons and Bombs: Was Rice Right for Once? Roger Burbach Evo Morales: the Early Days Seth Sandronsky Economy on Ice Website of the Weekend Just Say Know   February 10, 2006 Carl G. Estabrook A US War Plan for Khuzestan? Sen. Russell Feingold A Raw Deal on the Patriot Act Roxanne Dunbar--------Ortiz How Did Evo Morales Come to Power? Saree Makdisi The Tempest Over the Hamas Charter Website of the Day The New York Art Scene: 1974--------1984   February 9, 2006 Dave Lindorff Bush and Yamashita: War Crimes and Commanders--------in--------Chief Mike Marqusee The Human Majority was Right About Iraq Paul Craig Roberts How Conservatives Went Crazy: the Rightwing Press Peter Phillips Inside the Global Dominance Group: 200 Insiders Against the World William S. Lind Rumsfeld the Maximalist: the Long War Christine Tomlinson Innocent Targets in the "Long War": False Positives and Bush's Eavesdropping Program Will Youmans Church of England Votes to Divest from Israel Robert Robideau An American Indian's View of the Cartoons Richard Neville The Cartoons That Shook the World: All This from the Danes, the Least Funny People on Earth Peter Rost The New Robber Barons Website of the Day Eyes Wide Open   February 8, 2006 Ron Jacobs The Once and Future Sly Stone: Soundtrack to a Riot Stan Cox Making and Unmaking History with General Myers Sen. Russ Feingold Why Bush's Wiretapping Program is Illegal and Unconstitutional Robert Jensen Horowitz's Academic Hit List: Take a Class from One of the CounterPunch 16 Rep. Cynthia McKinney Bush Should Have Wiretapped FEMA and Chertoff Niranjan Ramakrishnan Alberto Gonzales Channels Mark Twain Don Monkerud Covenant Marriage on the Rocks David Swanson Inequality and War C.L. Cook Nuking Ontario Christopher Fons Chill Out Jihadis: They're Just Cartoons! Jeffrey Ballinger The Other Side of Nike and Social Responsibility Website of the Day Encyclopedia of Terrorism in the Americas   February 7, 2006 Edward Lucie--------Smith An Urgent Plea to Save a Small Estonian Museum from Neo--------Nazis Robert Fisk The Fury: Now Lebanon is Burning Paul Craig Roberts Colin Powell's Career as a "Yes Man" Neve Gordon Why Hamas Won Joshua Frank The Hillary and George Show: Partners in War Peter Montague The Problem with Mercury: a History of Regulatory Capitulation Jackie Corr The Last Best Choice: Public Power and Montana Jeffrey St. Clair Rumsfeld's Enforcer: the Secret World of Stephen Cambone Website of the Day Negroes with Guns   February 6, 2006 Christopher Brauchli Spilling Blood: Two Sentences Robert Fisk Don't Be Fooled: This Isn't About Islam vs. Secularism John Chuckman What Did Stephen Harper Actually Win? Jenna Orkin Judge Slams EPA for Lying About 9/11's Toxic Air Paul Craig Roberts Who Will Save America: My Epiphany   February 4 / 5, 2006 Alexander Cockburn "Lights Out in Tehran": McCain Starts Bombing Run Mike Ferner Pentagon Database Leaves No Kid Alone James Petras Evo Morales's Cabinet: a Bizarre Beginning in Bolivia Alan Maass Scare of the Union: Dems Collaborate with Bush on Surveillance Fred Gardner Annals of Law Enforcement: a Look Inside the San Francisco DA's Office Ralph Nader Bush's Energy Escapades Bill Glahn RIAA Watch: Speaking in Tongues Saul Landau Freedom 2006: Buying Sex on the Net or Those Older Freedoms? Laura Carlsen Bad Blood on the Border: Killing Guillermo Martinez James Brooks Our Little Shop of Diplomatic Horrors Mike Roselle Hippies and Revolutionaries in Carcacas John Holt Black Gold, Black Death: Canada's Oil Sands Frenzy Sarah Ferguson Cops Suing Cops ... for Spying on Cops William S. Lind Beware the Ides of March Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Price of Globalization: Free Trade or Free Speech? Seth Sandronsky The Color of Job Cuts in the Auto Industry Derrick O'Keefe Rumsfeld's Hitler Analogy Michael Donnelly Hop on the Bus Ron Jacobs Religion and Political Power Elisa Salasin RSVP to Bush St. Clair / Vest Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week Stew Albert God's Curse: Selected Poems Poets' Basement Guthrie, LaMorticella and Engel Website of the Weekend Killer Tells All!   February 3, 2006 Toufic Haddad A Parliament of Prisoners Heather Gray Working with Coretta Scott King Tim Wise Racism, Neo--------Confederacy and the Raising of Historical Illiterates Conn Hallinan Nuclear Proliferation: the Gathering Storm Eva Golinger Rumsfeld and Negroponte Amp Up Hositility Toward Venezuela Daniel Ellsberg The World Can't Wait: Invitation to a Demonstration Dave Zirin Detroit: Super Bowl City on the Brink Robert Bryce The Problem with Cutting US Oil Imports from the Middle East Website of the Day The Chavez Code   February 2, 2006 Winslow T. Wheeler Pentagon Pork: How to Eliminate It Stan Cox Outsourcing the Golden Years Rachard Itani Danes (Finally) Apologize to Muslims (For the Wrong Reasons) Mike Whitney Afghanistan Five Years Later: Buildings Down, Heroin Up Amira Hass In the Footsteps of Arafat: an Interview with Hamas' Ismail Haniya Norman Solomon When Praise is Desecration: Smothering King's Legacy with Kind Words Michael Simmons Stew Lives! Christopher Reed Japan's Dirty Secret: One Million Korean Slaves Website of the Day State of Nature   February 1, 2006 Sharon Smith The Bluff and Bluster Dems: Alito and the Faux Filibuster Jason Leopold Enron and the Bush Administration Cindy Sheehan Getting Busted at the State of the Union: What Really Happened Joseph Grosso Oprah and Elie Wiesel: a Match Made in "Neutrality" Earl Ofari Hutchinson Coretta Scott King was More Than Just Dr. King's Wife Steven Higgs Life After Roe. v. Wade Robert Robideau "God Given Rights": Palestine and Native America R. Siddharth Tales of Power: When Gandhi Rejected a Faustian Bargain with Henry Ford Jim Retherford Remembering Stew Albert: the Quiet Genius Rep. Cynthia McKinney The Legacy of Coretta Scott King Paul Craig Roberts The True State of the Union Website of the Day Candide's Notebooks

February 16, 2006 Pictures That Missed the Exhibition The Torture Photos Congress Didn't Want You to See By LILA RAJIVA Yesterday (February 16), Australia’s public broad caster, SBS, aired some 60 unpublished photos of torture at Abu Ghraib prison on its show Dateline at 8:30 PM. The images were rapidly re--broadcast on Arab TV and other news outfits and have been condemned immediately as a violation of international law by the International Red Cross. (1) The new detainee diorama -- a world exclusive, apparently -- includes pictures of bleeding and hooded prisoners bound to beds and doors, of naked men handcuffed together or in a pile, of corpses, of dogs snarling at the faces of prisoners, of cigarette burns on buttocks and wounds from shotgun pellets, and of even more graphic sexual torture. And it comes on the heels of a British video showing British soldiers brutally assaulting unarmed Iraqi teens in Basra. No one can now question that criminal behavior was rampant among Coalition Forces. The Aussie torture--trove is culled from a set deemed unfit for the tender sensibilities of the American public but shown to our no doubt much sturdier Congress and Senate members during hearings in the summer of 2004. That was shortly after the Abu Ghraib scandal first broke -- in mainstream journalism, that is. Of course, it was pretty much plastered all over the alternative press for at least a year before CBS 60 Minutes (on April 28, 2004) and the New Yorker got around to picking it up. Still, they never got to the most graphic pix...involving, we hear, women being forced to bare breasts and genitals at gun point. (2) These are -- in part -- the pictures that the government has been battling to keep under wraps for more than a year now. Even when last year a judge gave the ACLU access after a Freedom of Information Act request, the government appealed, claiming publication might fan anti--American sentiment ---- and who could possibly dream of doing that? Funny how freedom of expression -- so indispensable for the survival of Western Civilization when it comes to inflammatory and dangerous anti--Muslim imagery -- gets jettisoned in a hurry when it comes to exposing war crimes. Mike Carey, the executive producer of the SBS show believes that several journalists also have the pictures and wonders why they were not published until now: "I think it’s strange, maybe they think it’s more of the same." (3) It was Dateline which first exposed the role of the Howard government in the torture of Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib, illegally detained and then tortured in Egypt and at Guantanamo Bay. (4) But, here Carey sounds rather naive. What does he think journalists today are about, anyway, if they can’t double as megaphones for government propaganda? Reporters who had the pictures but didn’t publish them were only doing their bit for the war effort, like the good little foot--soldiers they are. Or the good little intelligence/PR operatives. Think male escort--turned White House-- presstitute, Jeff Guckert--Gannon. (5) The first time around -- in May 2004 -- when the pressure was on for the government to come clean and Rumsfeld’s head looked like it might roll -- another decapitation conveniently swept everything else off the stage. (6) That was the videotaped beheading -- almost undoubtedly staged -- of American tower repairman, war profiteer, and Republican operative, Nicholas Berg, a passing acquaintance, as it quaintly turned out, of Zacarias Moussaoui. (7) Berg had a rather checkered career that took him from interviews with Michael Moore to fixing radio towers at Abu Ghraib to partnering with an Iraqi cocaine--dealer, Al-- Taee, with connections to the Russian mafia. While awaiting deportation, the multi--faceted Taee, who once shared photo space with Paul Wolfowitz, also apparently managed to pick up a raft of gigs on Fox and Clear Channel where he was oppressed--freedom--fighter--in--residence and big--time cheer--leader for the Iraq war. (8) But his spotty resume and less than savory social circle didn’t stop Berg from becoming the poster--boy for the Freepers and the semi--lunatic fringe of right--wing storm--troopers, frothing at the mouth over all the wasted attention on some naked Iraqi blokes. They got their way. By the middle of May 2004, the pressure was off. Torturing hundreds of innocent men, women -- and it looks like -- children, simply didn’t cut it next to the snuff movie of the all--American Berg. Rumsfeld remained on his perch, without even a flick on the wrist from the President, who -- it should be said -- is also mentioned in the ACLU memos as having penned an incriminating executive memo. But you’d never see that in the press. Or that heavily redacted directive -- courtesy of one Paul Wolfowitz it seems -- telling Gitmo interrogators to masquerade as FBI agents.(9) But you have to wonder where Carey himself got his bloody little album. And what sense it makes -- or doesn’t make -- for the thing to show up on Australian TV now, more than two years after the military first noticed it had a torture problem, in the middle of a sudden hemorrhage of inflammatory imagery and news -- renditions, the cartoons, the Basra child--abuse.... A lot of fog here, all right. Is it the fog of war though? And now can we see those pictures of Iraqi women, please? Lila Rajiva is a free--lance journalist and author of "The Language of Empire: Abu Ghraib and the American media," (Monthly Review Press). She can be reached at: lrajiva@hotmail.com (1) "Australian television to air new Abu Ghraib abuse pictures," AFP, February 15, 2006 and "Abuse violates international law: ICRC," Sydney Morning Herald, February 16, 2006. (2) "800 new pictures add to US disgust: Stills shown of women forced to bare breasts," Dan Glaister and Julian Borger, The Guardian, May 13, 2004 and "Torture at Abu Ghraib," Seymour Hersh, New Yorker, May 10, 2004. For an analysis of how constant charges of "fraud" managed to muddy the whole question of the torture of Iraqi women, see "Iraqi Women and Torture: Part I -- Rapes and Rumors of Rapes," Lila Rajiva, Dissident Voice, July 27, 2004 and "Colonial Violence Against Women In Iraq," Ghali Hassan, Countercurrents.org, May 31, 2004. (3) "The Photos America Doesn’t Want Seen," Matthew Moore, The Sydney Morning Herald, February 15, 2006. (4) "Covering Up," Editorial, The Guardian, March 16, 2005. (5)"An Identity Crisis Unfolds in a Not--So--Elite Press Corps" Johanna Neuman, Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2005. (6)"News Judgment Old and News Judgment New: American Nicholas Berg Beheaded," Jay Rosen, PressThink.com, May 6, 2004. PressThink won a freedom of expression award from Reporters Without Borders in June 2005. (7) "Berg's encounter with 'terrorist' revealed," CNN, May 14, 2004 and "Moore interviewed Berg for ‘Fahrenheit’", Rebecca Traister, Salon, May 27, 2004. (8) "Pro--war Iraqi figure may be deported from United States," AP, Pittsburgh Tribune--Review, April 15, 2003. See also, Liberty Forum Post 1488471, June 1, 2004 referencing the once ubiquitous photo. (9) Executive Order of the President dated May 22, 2004.

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