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December 4, 2001
Rep. Ron Paul
Keep Your
Eye on the Target
Susan
Herman
Ashcroft
and the Patriot Act
Tariq Ali
The Afghan
King and the Nazis
November 30, 2001
Jordan
Green
Disappeared
in the Southland
Willliam Blum
Rebuilding
Afghanistan?
November 29, 2001
Phillip
Cryan
Defining
Terrorism
Robert Fisk
We Are the
War Criminals Now
November 28, 2001
Tom Turnipseed
A
Continuum of Terror
Patrick Cockburn
Tribal
Council:
Don't Blame It All on Taliban
Robert
Fisk
At
Last, The Truth about the Sabra and Chatila Massacres
Harry Browne
The Bill of
Rights:
They Threw It All Away
Sunil
Sharma
Suffer
Palestine's Children
November 27, 2001
Paul Coggins
Kafka and
the Patriot Act
Tariq
Ali
Tigris
and Euprhates
November 26, 2001
Robert Fisk
Blood and
Tears in Kandahar
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Boeing's
Sweet Deal
CounterPunch Wire
Human
Rights Abuses and
Nuke Waste Shipments
Alexander
Cockburn
Harry
Potter and Terrorism
November 25, 2001
Ralph Nader
The Crisis
in Leadership
Sam Bahour
Israel's
Choice
November 24, 2001
Patrick Cockburn
He Who
Has
the Guns Rules
November 23, 2001
Phyllis
Pollack
Long
Live The Clash
Cockburn/St. Clair
The Press
and
the Patriot Act
November 22, 2001
Oscar
Gonzalez
A
Homeland Thanksgiving
November 21, 2001
CounterPunch Wire
Rep. Chambliss
Calls for Arrest of Every Muslim That Enters Georgia
Tom Turnipseed
Broadcasting
and Bombing
David Price
Academia Under
Attack
Molly
Secours
Modern
Day Witch Trials
Tariq Ali
Killing
Mr. Biswas
November 20, 2001
Sam Bahour
Plain
Truths About Palestine
Michael Ratner
Moving Toward
a
Police State
A Photographic Journal of Life
in an Afghan Refugee Camp
By Judith Mann
November 19, 2001
Edward
Said
Suicidal
Ignorance
November 18, 2001
John Farley
Shame on You,
Chelsea!
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
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8-Page Special Issue
War Diary
CIA's Assassination Plan a History of
Torture in US Prisons
bin Laden and Bush
Business Connections
Aisha Ikramuddin on the Hidden Hype
of US Food Bombs
Peter Linebaugh on
Pakistan
Christopher Hitchens' Love for Mrs. Thatcher
Jiang Zemin Tells Bush:
Nuke 'Em
Search
CounterPunch
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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
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December
4, 2001
The Left's "Silver
Lining"
Hurray!
The Era of Big Government Is Back...As Big Police?
By Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
It had seemed to us that one absolutely certain
fact, beyond all dispute or question, is that the terror attacks
of September 11 had no silver lining, no unexpectedly beneficial
fall-out. September 11 was, is and will be a terrible business
with endlessly terrible consequences. It killed thousands, impelled
a punitive expedition which will almost certainly procreate further
martial forays. The war party is agitating for an onslaught on
Iraq. Here in America the backwash of September 11 has shriveled
civil liberties and political dissent and we will spend the rest
of our lives trying to recapture lost ground.
But no. The editor of the Nation, Katrina
vanden Heuvel, (whose periodical has promoted the notion of a
"just war" in Afghanistan) has now coauthored a column
with Joel Rogers of the University of Wisconsin, published in
the Los Angeles Times on November 25, proposing the following:
"If anything, the war on terrorism
creates an opening for progressives, not closure-indeed, it presents
the opportunity of a lifetime.
"It is a truism of modern politics
that war generally mobilizes and helps the democratic left. It
does so in part because of the short-term repression wartime
often brings, but also because war raises the stakes in politics
and invites consideration of wider goals, including justice.
War's mobilization of the populace against a shared threat also
heightens social solidarity, while underscoring the need for
government and other social institutions that transcend or replace
the market. And war's horrors daily press the question of how
military action can be avoided in the future without abandoning
core principles of domestic order
"All this shifts the playing field
of political debate away from those who counsel "let's leave
it to the market or the military" as the answer to all human
concerns. Far from seeming hard-nosed and realistic, they suddenly
appear beside the point, if not immoral. Those who believe in
social justice and shared democratic effort in problem solving,
by contrast, seem onto something important and even admirable.
"And the hot Christmas dolls this
year are firefighters, emergency medical personnel and municipal
police.
"In brief, Sept. 11 has made the
idea of a public sector, and the society that it serves, attractive
again. It enlarged the public's view that unilateral military
action is a bad recipe for international peace. This doesn't
describe a political space from which the left is forever excluded,
but one in which it is virtually invited to reenter mainstream
politics."
So here's the supposed silver lining,
comrades: the return to favor of Big Government. You want to
be reminded of what Big Government has been up to in the past
few weeks? The Antiterrorism Act passed by Congress at the President's
request in late October guts the Constitution's guarantees of
habeas corpus, presumption of innocence, and due process.
It allows the the federal government
in the form of the Justice Department, CIA, FBI, and INS to detain
non-citizens on nonexistent or secret evidence, conduct wiretaps
and surveillance without evidence of wrong-doing, conduct searches
and seizures without warrant, eavesdrop on private conversations
between defendants and their lawyers in violation of attorney-client
privilege, and investigate private citizens without 'probable
cause'. The bill also allows the government to wield the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 as a weapon to harass
dissident organizations under the guise of fighting terrorism,
subjecting them to unconstitutional search and seizure. Add
to this trashing of the Bill of Rights the president's order
for military tribunals. All this, and the liberal Democrats see
this as a time of opportunity to invoke the benefits of big government!
On this form, these people would hail concentration camps as
encouraging pointers towards a "new sense of collectivity".
This is crackpot realism on an epic scale, and we have by no
means exhausted the malign idiocy of the vanden Heuvel/Rogers
manifesto. For example: "Americans also got a crash course
in the unsavory aspects of US foreign policy." Does this
mean that because the amiable national discussion of the benefits
of torture elicited we should hail September 11 as the instigator
of a useful history lesson?
More from vanden Heuvel and Rogers: "[September
11] enlarged the public's view that unilateral military action
is a bad recipe for international peace. This doesn't describe
a political space from which the left is forever excluded, but
one in which it is virtually invited to reenter mainstream politics."
We can imagine that just such nonsense was written by Europe's
social democrats when, in 1914, they abandoned collective, internationalist
opposition to the madness that was about to kill millions, and
separately made haste to vote war credits to their various governments.
What "mainstream politics" is the left (at least as
represented by vanden Heuvel and by Rogers) excitedly joining?
The political mainstream has given easy passage to the Patriot
Act and in Congress, with just one dissenting vote from Rep Barbara
Lee of Berkeley, it handed Bush all the war-making powers he
craved.
Years ago we learned that most mainstream
liberals don't give a hoot about the Bill of Rights, or about
the paramount importance of independent, 12-member, unanimous
juries, whose central role pervades the Bill of Rights. The liberals'
vision of big government is coercive to its core. Eric Hobsbawm
showed that the model for the organization of their desired society
used by many social democrats in the interwar period was the
German War Plan of 1914. FDR's New Deal was basically cribbed
from Mussolini's New Order.
So who are our allies then? Who's raising
a ruckus amid these devastations of the Constitution? The mainstream
isn't raising a ruckus, even against the notion of torture. For
voices of conscience and sanity we have to turn to a thin red
line of anti-imperial leftists, to the radical bar whose overworked
members toil for the immigrants and the poor. We can turn to
the libertarians, such as Rep Ron Paul of Texas who has delivered
powerful speeches in Congress denouncing Ashcroft's jihad against
the Constitution. Ron Paul alone spilled the beans on how a cabal
of House Republicans and Democrats rammed through the final version
of the Patriot Act without it even being read by House members.
The strongest journalistic voice against
the military tribunals has been William Safire, even more forceful
than Nat Hentoff whose own denunciations of the rape of the Constitution
have been appearing in the Washington Times. From Italy, Gore
Vidal has been equally robust, and the only question for us is
when Vidal will recant on his announcement last year that Christopher
is his "anointed" heir, his "Dauphin". Hitchens
of course has been gung-ho for bombing, while simultaneously
libeling Noam Chomsky and others, with the assertion that it
"no longer matters" what Chomsky thinks.
Ralph Nader delivered a powerful speech
against the war and the various green parties have all issued
decent statements. The ACLU has shown understanding of the necessity
for broad coalitions of left and right to defend the Constitution.
It has brought together left civil libertarians with such icons
of the far right as Paul Weyrich, Grover Norquist, Phyllis Schlafly,
Bob Barr and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, recruiting
all these names to the terms of its opposition to the Patriot
Act.
That said, we would add that the work
of such bodies as the ACLU has so far been reactive. Yet we are
confronted with a situation where FBI agents have been sent to
"interview" a projected total of 5,000 immigrants who
have entered the country in the last two years. We have been
told that the FBI agents are under instructions to immediately
arrest anyone disclosuing evidence of any violation of law, on
the spot. So these interviews are fraught with peril for the
uninformed, who may make an innocent misstatement and end up
facing perjury charges. So why haven't groups like the ACLU distributed
"know your rights" cards for those who have been profiled
and are now in the FBI's sights.
Only one US senator, Feingold of Wisconsin,
voted against the USA Patriot bill. Though Rep Dennis Kucinich
voted for war-making, he has since tried to get the "left"
in Congress to pull the plug on Bush's military tribunals, but
as of November 28, could only find 37 colleagues to agree with
him, one of whom is Bob Barr, the conservative former prosecutor
who also was among those attacking from the earliest days the
provisions of the USA Patriot Act. And guess who wrote this:
"Today, America is being stampeded into a new undeclared
war, against Iraq. This is a time for truth ? a time for Congress
to do its duty, and debate and decide on war or peace. We do
not need to have our politics poisoned for yet another generation
by the mutual recriminations of a War Party and a Peace Party
in the aftermath of yet another undeclared war No more undeclared
wars. No more presidential wars." It was Patrick Buchanan
who, like Safire, wrote speeches for Richard Nixon.
We've always said that the true contours
of American politics are in no way reflected by the conventional
political maps. The post-Sept. 11 events have confirmed that
analysis with acid clarity. CP
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