Cockburn
/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
May
13, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
Law 'n Order in La Paz: All Quiet
on the Southern Front?
May
12, 2004
Blanton
/ Kornbluh
Prisoner Abuse: Cheney Warned in
1992
Virginia
Tilley
So, Who's to Blame?
Bruce
Jackson
James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator
of Them All
Thomas
P. Healy
No Enemies: Making Peace with Bert Sacks
Linda
S. Heard
Racism and Ignorance: a Lethal Cocktail in Iraq
Norman
Solomon
Spinning Torturegate
Lisa
Viscidi
The People's Voice: Community Radio in Guatemala
Jack
Heyman
View from the Bay Bridge: Longshoremen Plan Mass Workers March
on DC
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Rummy's Reprieve
CounterPunch
Wire
Teamsters Corruption Scandal: Hoffa Exec. Assistant Alleged to
Have Quashed Investigation into Mob Influence
Christopher
Brauchli
Detention Camp, USA
William
S. Lind
Bush's Waterloo?
May 11, 2004
Mark
Engler
On the "Necessity" of Torture
Ray
McGovern
More Troops? A March of Folly
Kurt
Nimmo
Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment
Mickey
Z.
Less Than Hero
Christopher
Reed
Torture on the Homefront: America's Long History of Prison Abuse
Dennis
Hans
When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar
Bruce
Jackson
Pete Seeger at 85
Mike
Whitney
Killing al Sadr
Simon
Helweg-Larsen
Shrinking the Guatemalan Military
William
A. Cook
The Unconscious Country: Righteous Indignation,
Nakedly Displayed
May
10, 2004
Robert
Fisk
From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib: Racism
and Torture as Entertainment
Wayne
Madsen
The Israeli Torture Template: Rape,
Feces and Urine-Soaked Cloth Sacks
Col.
Dan Smith
The Shame of Abu Ghraib
Joe
Bageant
John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife!
Ron
Jacobs
Rummy's Prisongate Blues: Don't Leave Mad; Just Leave
Ben
Tripp
Getting in Touch with Your Inner Savage
Ray
Hanania
Why They Hate Us: Racism, Bigotry and Abuse
Reza
Fiyouzat
"Mishandled" Invasions
Diane
Christian
Images & Abstractions &
Genitals
Website
of the Day
Crushing Iraqi Skulls with Tanks for Sport?
May
8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
May
7, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention
Facilities in Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ahmad
Faruqui
The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien
Phu
Alexander
Zaitchik
From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison)
Bell?
Mike
Whitney
The Price of Victory
Norman
Solomon
This War, Racism and Media Denial
M.
Shahid Alam
A Comic Apology
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
Website
of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq
May
4, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations
and Responses
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture
David
Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq
Barry
Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers
Patrick
Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised
Dr.
Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say
Fidel
Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War
Mike
Whitney
Empire of Torture
Sonali
Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against
John Kerry
Josh
Frank
The Lost Sierra Club
Stan
Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq
Agustin
Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics
Stew
Albert
American Know-How
Website
of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up
May
3, 2004
Virginia
Tilley
Let the Wall of Silence Fall
May
1 / 2, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
An Army in Disgrace, a Policy
in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat
Robert
Fisk
"Good Guys" Who Can Do No
Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders,
Useless Spies, Angry World
Heather
Williams
Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin
American Troops Flee Iraq
Diane
Rejman
An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq:
Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
Diane
Christian
Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and
Sharon Speak the Same Language
Patrick
Cockburn
Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked,
Shocked, Shocked
Chris
Floyd
Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists
and Annihilation
April
29 / 30, 2004
Dave
Zirin
A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome
Death of Pat Tillman
Kathy
Kelly
The Warden's Tour
Greg
Weiher
Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the
Banality of Evil
Michael
S. Ladah
Terrorism and Assassination: the
Ultimate Depception
Patrick
Cockburn
The Fallujah Mutinies
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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May
13, 2004
Digitalizing
Information Retrieval
Reality TV Bites
By MARC SALOMON
For the first time since dead soldiers
were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, the graphic realities
of war have been broadcast into every American home. After a
two decade hiatus from direct military involvement, Bush I with
Cheney running Defense devised the current toolkit for managing
media access to combat operations through pool reporters to avoid
the embarassment of public disclosure.
This worked well during the
1991 Gulf War with the public numbed by the telejournalistic
equivalent of a fuzzy video game mitigated through fuzzy logic
running commentary on CNN, and was poised for success until "victory"
was declared by a stage managed crotch-enhanced carrier-borne
Bush II and "offensive" combat ceased in 2003.
Combat footage from Vietnam
arrived weeks delayed, shot by photographers integrated with
platoons on reels of 16mm motion picture film and practically
hand carried out of the jungle and to an outpost of "civilization"
worlds away for broadcast bracketing the nightly body counts.
In Somalia the video of the fate of the downed Blackhawk crew
was broadcast almost in realtime through media channels by satellite.
Now that digital photography,
video production and internet access distribution are cheap and
globally ubiquitous, the formerly high barriers to production
and distribution of imagery, both physical, financial and temporal,
are lowered. Once the bombs quit flying in earnest in Iraq last
year and the risk lowered for a while and the nation became more
porous, The realities of occupation now become available for
immediate consumption by a nation already overdosing on synthesized
reality television.
Who would be best positioned
as reality television stars but ex military mercenaries? The
reality ante is upped for all but the GIs when State of the Art
War substitutes contracted mercenaries for grunts. These war
profiteers are as well compensated and white as the military
service members' families of color are encouraged to rely on
foodstamps. Can Rumsfeld's "State Of the Art" war be
a means towards effective resegregation of the US Military into
public and private divisions?
Only in America are hands wrung
that civilian war profiteers like Berg or those burned to a crisp
in Falluja or even outright spies like CIA spy Johnny Spann who
was killed in an Afghanistan prison by rebellious former interrogees--as
if the Geneva Convention doesn't clearly specify the fate of
civilian clothed enemy in a war zone and spies in particular.
And who's to differentiate between Daniel Pearl and Tokyo Rose,
as if the Wall Street Journal were not a combatant?
One would hope that many American
civilians would at least tolerate if not encourage the same spirit
of resistance amongst our compatriots if the roles were reversed
and our nation was being brutally occupied for the crimes of
illegitimate leaders by a foreign power.
But it was the GIs that felt
free and clear to document and show off their abuse of Iraqi
prisoners, behavior the likes of which had been formerly relegated
to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice under Governor Bush
(the only murderer he saved from the needle was serial killer
Henry Lee Lucas) or the Youth Authority and Pelican Bay here
in California. There is a straight line connecting police abuse
in communities of color to the Israeli Mossad inspired "information
retrieval" in Iraq. The only crime here was documenting
it.
In America, prison rape is
assumed. In occupied Iraq, faux outrage at prison abuse becomes
a fig leaf covering the brutality of occupation, while profiteers
running the romantic risk between fantastic riches and decapitation
provide offensive balance in the battle of staged graphic footage.
As with any good imperial authoritarian
regime struggling to exert dominance over a population with other
ideas, show trials are the best way of targetting scapegoats
and legitimating the regime both on the home front and in the
province. If occupation prison abuse pseudoscandals can turn
the public eye away from the fact that gunships are painting
civilian neighborhoods in Iraqi urban centers in lead, all the
better. So long as we don't have to deal with the substance of
the flowering of resistance that more than a decade of US policy
has sewn in the Iraqi people, the prison abuse affair serves
its sexy propaganda purpose as weapons of mass distraction.
That the dates for the first
courts martial come a scant hours after Rumsfeld's congressional
not so mea not so culpa carries the whiff of Rovian scripting.
The Coalition Provisional Authority [sic] intends to stage the
spectacles in the Baghdad convention center. An ornate Stalinesque
palace might have made a better backdrop for a show trial, but
the convention center was probably more media cycle friendly.
But the real issue here is
one of personal responsibility and the unwillingness of the Bush
II, Rumsfeld and Cheney smirk patrol to accept it while brutally
forcing it on others at home and abroad. The neocon mantra that
the domestic poor should assume "personal responsibility"
for their intentional economic marginalization at the hands of
the greedy plutocracy contrasts sharply with pathological patterns
of denial exhibited by a Team Bush that is unwilling to concede
any error when they serially pass the buck on responsibility
for those darn unintended consequences in Iraq.
American policy in the southwestern
Asian oil patch involves both support for oppressive regimes
that keep the petrol flowing by keeping populations miserable
and full aid and comfort for the most extreme atrocities committed
by the Israelis in their own failing long term occupation. When
these two forces are combined and amplified by exponentially
regressive missteps of hubris, there can be only violent outcomes
and the only target can be you and I.
The Iraqis had as much say
in selecting Saddam Hussen to be their leader as we ended up
having when the Supreme Court political majority selected the
Bush sequel here and neither of our civilian populations should
suffer from the idiocy of these illegitimate leaders. From this
shared experience of maniacal warmongers destroying our two nations,
perhaps our two peoples might someday find common ground.
The only prerequesite for Iraqi
pacification, therefore, is the immediate extraction of US presence.
The Republicans aren't going
to do it, the Democrats won't and the Electoral College is rigged
against the Green Party which is still too green to compete nationally.
So to the extent that the debate
on federal and foreign policy is restricted to the rate of decay
of empire and to what degree power is applied to maintain the
US need for cheap resources, the totalitarians win by default
because with every passing day, with every notch higher on the
totem poles of idiocy by Bush II, the target get painted brighter
and brighter on our national ass by those with a means, motive
and opportunity to fire which in turn necessitates even more
shrill security measures.
If the Americans can lay waste
to civilians in Falluja, if the Israelis can lay waste to refugee
camps in Jenin, then who the hell are we to say that the Iraqis
and their allies cannot respond in kind to American civilians?
The US alone holds overwhelming power in this scenario. Either
we wield power wisely, or we will take personal responsibility
for the unintended consequences of its deadly exercise whether
we like it or not.
Marc Salomon lives in San Francisco. He can be
reached at: marc@cybre.net
Weekend Edition
Features for May 8 / 9, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Torture: as American as Apple Pie
Adam
Jones
America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated
and Shot at Kunduz?
Douglas
Valentine
Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press
Kurt
Nimmo
Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib
Brian
Cloughley
Humpty Dumpty is Falling
Lucia
Dailey
Forbidden Games
Joanne
Mariner
* * * *: Redacting Moussaoui
Mickey
Z.
Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders)
John
Chuckman
The Thing with No Brain
Doug
Giebel
Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs
Norm
Dixon
How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11
Sam
Bahour
A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah
Susan
Davis
Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art
Dave
Marsh
In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing
Laura
Flanders
Life with Dick and Lynne
Dave
Zirin
Fans Push Spiderman Off Base
Carolyn
Baker
Why I Won't Vote in 2004
Prince
"Ain't No Sense in Voting"
Dr.
Susan Block
Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation
Poets'
Basement
Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska
|