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Today's Stories

Mike Marqusee
Message from London

July 6, 2005

Elaine Cassel
Political Necrophilia in Florida: Jeb Bush and Terri Schiavo, a Strange Affair

Sean Donahue
Why the G8 Debt Relief Plan Won't Help Nicaragua's Poor

Jeremy R. Hammond
State Sponsors of Terrorism, Applying the US Standard

Joshua Frank
Will Rove be Indicted?

Ali Khan
The "Gift" of US Democratization

Michael Dickinson
Billy Graham's Final Crusade: Blessed are the Warmakers

Norman Solomon
How to Plunge Deeper into a Quagmire: Withdrawal and US Credibility

Dave Zirin
Triumph of the Shrill: Tony Blair's Olympiad

Gary Leupp
Accusing Ahmadinejad

Website of the Day
Humiliation in Baghdad: "Not Something We Would Do"

July 5, 2005

Behrooz Ghamari
What's the Matter with Iran?: How the Reformists Lost the Presidency

Elaine Cassel
Why This Progressive Will Miss Sandra Day O'Connor

Ron Jacobs
Robert and Mabel Williams's Great Fight for Justice

Bob Libal
The Right's Assault on Academia

Dr. Peter Rost
Mea Culpa from a Big Pharma CEO

Mark Engler
The Big Debt Deal: Where's the Jubilee?

Gideon Levy
They Broke the Public's Heart

Dave Zirin
The Great Olympics Scam

Sameer Dossani
The Trouble with Gleneagles

 

July 2 / 4, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
"Bomb Teheran!" Urges Jilted Condi?

Lenni Brenner
Jefferson, God and the Fourth of July

Laura Carlsen
Zapatista's Red Alert

James Petras
The Pretensions of Neoliberalism: Six Myths About the Benefits of Foreign Investment

William A. Cook
Kings of Serpents

Brian Cloughley
Quagmire of the Vanities

Saul Landau
The Mass Media, Symbols and Ownership

Tom Crumpacker
Who Has What to Hide About Luis Posada Carriles?

Greg Moses
Dylan's America

Dr. Susan Block
My Adelphia Story: a Tale of Censorship, Fraud, Christian Family Values and Really Lousy Cable Service

Fran Shor
Disassembling Bush's Iraq War: Liberated into a No Man's Land

Fred Gardner
Study: Smoking Marijuana Does Not Cause Lung Cancer

Moshe Adler
The New London Case: Corporate Giveaways That Destroy Communities, But Don't Create Jobs

David Model
The Downing Street Memo: So What's New?

Seth Sandronsky
California Spying, Schwarzenegger-Style

Ramzy Baroud
Managed Democracy in the Middle East

Suzan Mazur
Frank Carlucci the First: the "Sublime Prince" of Scranton

Ben Tripp
Voltaire, I Can Dig Your Rap

Justin Taylor
Faux Biography and the Pleasures of "Lint"

Brendan Bailey
Mesh Caps, Vice Magazine and the Trouble with Irony

Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel and Louise

Website of the Weekend
Radical Reference

 

July 1, 2005

Christopher Brauchli
With Friends Like These: Bush Buddies Karimov and Musharraf

Pat Williams
What Real Westerners Think About Bush's Pseudo-Cowboy Palaver

Gary Leupp
Summer Surprise?

John Stauber
Mad Cow in America: the USDA Continues to Lie

John Chuckman
The Blessings of Canada

Justicia y Paz
Colombia's Disappeared: Their Names, At Least!

Cockburn / St. Clair
It's Put Up or Shut Up for Bush and the Dems on the Supreme Court

 

June 30, 2005

Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to Carl Levin: Compassion for Iraqis

John Stauber
Oprah Not the "Only" Mad Cow in America

Virginia Rodino
All Roads Lead to Baghdad: Unity in the Anti-War Movement

Jason Leopold
Meet the New Chair of the FERC: James Kelliher, the Man Who Invited Enron to Write Bush's Energy Policy

Dave Lindorff
What Was Bush Thinking?

Greg Moses
Racism at Cape Cod

Norman Solomon
Memo to the Iraq War

Joshua Frank
Israel's Theocrats

Alexander Cockburn
The Political Function of PBS

 

June 29, 2005

Mike Schaefer
How the Washington Post Lied About Its Own War Poll

Roger Burbach / Paul Cantor
Bush's Big Democratic Hoax in Iraq

Sharon Smith
Democrats Shift into Reverse

Sam Husseini
A Quick Way to End the Insurgency

John Stauber
Put a Photo of Mad Cow #2 on a Milk Carton

Ahmad Faruqui
Is Militarism Irreversible in Pakistan?

Linda S. Heard
Bush's Speech: the View from Cairo

Stew Albert
Chet Helms: a Rock and Roll Hero

Ray McGovern
Bush at Ft. Bragg: Stay the Crooked Course

 

 

June 28, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
A Defeat Bred in Deceit

Landau / Hassen
Bush's Meddling in Internal Syrian Politics

John A. Murphy
Keeping Nader Off the Ballot: an Analysis of Political Profiling in Pennsylvania

Mike Whitney
More Lies from Rumsfeld: Those "Meetings" with Insurgents

CounterPunch News Service
JFK on Staying in Vietnam: Is Bush Reading from Kennedy's Playbook?

Dave Zirin
Pining for the Pistons

Dave Lindorff
Showtime in Washington

Patrick Cockburn
Iraq: a Bloody Mess

 

June 27, 2005

Paul Craig Roberts
Blood Sacrifices for Empty Slogans

Mike Marqusee
G8: Who are the Hijackers?

Mark Scaramella
When a Corporate Raider Claims Economic Hardship: the Court-Approved Lies of Charles Hurwitz

Leigh Saavedra
Press Apologists for Torture

Kathy Kelly
Where is the UN?


June 25 / 26, 2005

Alexander Cockburn
The Supreme Court's Jackboot Liberals

Jennifer Van Bergen
America's Parallel Legal Systems

George Corsetti
This Land is Their Land: Condemnation for Corporations

Mark Chmiel / Andrew Wimmer
Let's Open the Gulag: a People's Mission to Gitmo

Kevin Zeese
Counter-Recruitment: How to Keep the Military From Getting their Hands on Your Kids

P. Sainath
Russian Roulette in Vidharbha

John Stauber
How to Bury a Mad Cow

Scott Handleman
Gay in the Third World

Tom Barry
The Politics & Ideologies of the Anti-Immigrationists

John Walsh
Looking for Peace in All the Wrong Places

Justin E.H. Smith
The Hairless Apes of Kansas vs. the Reality-Based Community: Why Progressives Have a Stake in the War on Evolution

Alan Wallis
The Story of Pinky: the Drug Trade in My Neighborhood

Ben Tripp
Negative Space: an Artful Lesson

Frederick B. Hudson
Songs to Lose Your Loneliness By: the Raised Voices of Sweet Honey in the Rock

Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Engel, Davies, and Albert

 

 

June 24, 2005

Ray McGovern
The Downing St. Fixation: Fixing to Fix "Fixed"

Jorge Mariscal
"They Only Call Us Americans When They Need Us for War": the Paradox of Mexican Americans in Iraq

Desiree Hellegers
Portland vs. the FBI

Zeynep Toufe
What Do the American People Know and When Did They Know It?

Joshua Frank
Call Him Senator Con Job

David Lindorff
Which Flag Would Jesus Burn?

Michael Neumann
Victory and Recruitment

Website of the Day
Gagging Dr. Dean

June 23, 2005

Christopher Brauchli
Thomas Griffith and Rule 49: He Practiced Law Without a License; Now He's a Federal Appeals Court Judge

Clay Conrad
Killing Off the Jury with Tort Reform

Standard Schaefer
A Retort to Military Neo-Liberalism

P. Sainath
Vidharbha: No rains and 116F, But It Does Have "Snow" and Water Parks

Mark Engler
CAFTA Deserves a Quiet Death

Norman Solomon
Voluntary Amnesia in America

Cockburn / St. Clair
Frank Calzon

Kathy Kelly
Where You Stand Determines What You See

 

June 22, 2005

Kevin Zeese
The Bush Administration's Psy-Ops on the American Public: an Interview with Col. Sam Gardiner

William S. Lind
Afghanistan: the Other War

Arsalan Iftikhar
Patriots Against the PATRIOT Act

Dan Nagengast
Give Populism a Chance: From France to Kansas

David Krieger
To the Graduates: We Live in an Interdependent World

Kathleen & Bill Christison
Tempest in Santa Fe: Confronting Israeli Myth-making

 

 

June 21, 2005

Brian Cloughley
Destroy the Unbelievers!

Mike Whitney
President Disconnect

Dave Lindorff
Who Needs Big Bird, Anyway?

Mark Weisbrot
Bush's Lonely Campaign Against Hugo Chavez

Matthew R. Simmons
The Coming Saudi Oil Crisis

Dave Zirin
The Crass Slipper Fits: Ron Howard's Terrible "Cinderella Man"

Virginia Rodino
The Anti-War Movement and Impeachment

Paul Craig Roberts
A War Waged by Liars and Morons

 

June 20, 2005

Alan Maass
The GM Job Massacre

Tariq Ali
To the Gates of the Gleneagles Hotel!

Mickey Z.
WMDs American-Style: It's 60 Years Since Alamogordo

William Blum
Some Things You Need to Know Before the World Ends

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Old News Indeed: In 1999, Bush Craved Chance to Attack Iraq

Jason Leopold
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Why the Media Should be Schiavo'd

Alan Maass
The GM Job Massacre

Uri Avnery
Condi and Hamas

Website of the Day
Crimes Against Poetry

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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July 7, 2005

Something Stinks

Judith Miller, the Anti-Hero

By JACK RANDOM

"As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." George W. Bush, Fort Bragg, NC, June 28, 2005.

"We can begin drawing down American forces to coincide with the number of trained Iraqi forces." Former Senator George McGovern and Congressman James McGovern (no relation), Boston Globe Op-ed, June 6, 2005.

" We cannot afford to lose"(1). "There's not enough force on the ground now to mount a real counterinsurgency"(2). Senator Joseph Biden, Senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee, commenting on Bush's speech at Fort Bragg.

"We don't have enough troops" there (2). Failed Democratic Presidential Candidate John Kerry on Bush's speech.

The ironies of history are plentiful. Richard Nixon opened relations with Red China, Deep Throat was lap dog for J. Edgar Hoover, Dan Rather was a cheerleader for war, and Judith Miller was a mouthpiece for the lies that led to war. Now, she is a martyr for her profession.

When you play with the devil, sometimes you get burned.

When Newsweek Magazine revealed the desecration of the Koran by American interrogators, the White House laid the blood of the innocent at the reporters' door. If there was any justification for that charge (there was in fact precious little), what then can be said of the reporter whose tireless "journalism" gave credibility to the now infamous weapons of mass destruction fraud? What can be said of an esteemed professional who shamelessly espoused the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection? Is there no blood on her hands?

As a reporter for the New York Times, Judith Miller was used by the White House to prosecute an illegal war of aggression that may ultimately cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Instead of learning her lessons and coming clean, she maintained her ties and secured her position as the print media point for White House propaganda.

She was leading the charge to war with Iraq, Syria and North Korea before the curious case of Valerie Plame imploded and brought her operation to a close.

Like Dan Rather before her, Judy Miller has left us in a quandary. We believe in freedom of the press but we also believe that Judy Miller has prostituted her profession to the White House propaganda machine.

Thus far, we have been given confusing accounts of what happened in this strange and baffling story. This much we know: Robert Novak was employed in a cheap, dirty trick, exposing an active undercover CIA agent in retaliation for her husband's objection to the administration's fabricated case for war. This despicable action placed her life and the lives of her associates in danger, blew the cover off covert operations, and thereby threatened the national security.

In a curious spin, Judy Miller's defenders (Robert Kuttner, Boston Globe) claim that she was not contacted to publish the malicious outing but rather contacted her White House sources to discover the source of the leak. We know that Miller did not go public with the story, so what can we surmise?

First, that Miller was named by someone ­ presumably by her own contacts since no one else should have known. In that case, Miller would owe her sources nothing. The principle of protected sources cannot apply to protecting the very individuals who would put you in jail.

Second, she must have learned who the leak was though she chose not to reveal it. Had she done so, she would have been serving the public good as well as fulfilling her journalistic duty. Had she done so, she would no longer be a White House darling but her current quandary would be heroic indeed.

If she did not discover who the source was then there is literally nothing to protect. She would simply be called upon to state for the record that she contacted certain White House officials and learned nothing. Case closed.

Clearly, there is no scenario we can surmise that would paint Judith Miller a hero.

We have heard Miller's colleagues in the media rally to her defense on the curious grounds that this is somehow retaliation for the Times' antiwar stance and wondered: What planet have they been living on? The Times was at the head of the list in promoting the cause of war and its subsequent mea culpa was something less than sincere.

We have heard them proclaim in tones of utter disbelief: She is going to jail for a story she never published! I admit I have joined that chorus but now I understand that publishing that story was both her responsibility and her redemption. That she chose not to publish is her own mea culpa.

Is she a journalist or a propagandist?

Did the story fail to serve her cause?

Did it threaten her good standing with the White House?

Of course, none of this can explain why Robert Novak is not in Judith Miller's shoes. What sort of deal did he cut? Unfortunately, given the state of American journalism, we can have little confidence that anyone is even trying to get to the core of this story. Moreover, there is the holdover case of the Bolton memos (demanded by the Senate, withheld by the White House). Given the Downing Street memos and the inexplicable refusal of the White House to yield on this matter, these are potentially explosive documents yet neither Miller nor her courageous colleagues seem interested.

There is also the outstanding question of what Miller knows that Matt Cooper of Time Magazine (released by the court when he agreed to cooperate with the blessings of his source) does not. Apparently, their sources are not the same. As Kuttner of the Globe rightly observed: Something stinks to high heaven.

The curious case of Judith Miller of the New York Times forces us to reconsider the rights and responsibilities of the media. Unfortunately, it comes down to this: If a journalist is employed in the commission of a federal crime (like plotting an assassination), he or she is not protected by the first amendment.

In this case, it seems amply clear that Robert Novak was the triggerman and no one has the right to protect the man who ordered the hit.

Jack Random is the author of the Jazzman Chronicles, the War Chronicles (Crow Dog Press) and Ghost Dance Insurrection (Dry Bones Press). He can be reached through his website: www.jackrandom.com.