How
the Press & the CIA
Killed Gary Webb's Career
Today's
Stories
January 21,
2005
Derek Seidman
An
Interview with Army Medic and Anti-War Activist Patrick Resta
January 20,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Dying
for Sycophants
William Cook
The
Bush Inauguration: A Mock Epic Fertility Rite
Joshua Frank
The Democrats and Iran: Look Who's Backing Bush's Next
Eric Ruder
Why Andres Raya Snapped: Another Casualty of Bush's War
Mike Whitney
Coronation in a Garrison State
Robert Jensen
A Citizens Oath of Office
Peter Rost
Bush Report on Drug Imports: Good Data, Bad Conclusions
David Underhill
Is It Torture Yet?: the Eclectic Fool Aid Torture Test
James Reiss
Adieu, Colin Powell: Pea Soup in Foggy Bottom
CounterPunch
Staff
Voices
from Abu Ghraib: the Injured Party
January 19,
2005
Marta Russell
Social
Security Privatization & Disability: 8 Million at Risk
Mike Ferner
Marines
Stretching Movement: Protesting Urban Warfare in Toledo
Nancy Oden
The
Nuremberg Principles, Iraq and Torture
Tony Paterson
A Catalogue of British Abuses in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
Bush's Divide-and-Conquer Plan to Destroy Social Security
Doug Giebel
BS and CBS: When 60 Minutes Helped Promote WMD Fantasies
Alexander Cockburn
Will
Bush Quit Iraq?
January 18,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
How
Americans Were Seduced by War: Empire and Militant Christianity
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Federal
Judge: Abu Ghraib Abuses Result of Decision to Ignore Geneva
Conventions
Douglas Lummis
It's a No Brainer; Send Graner: a Rap for Our Time
Ron Jacobs
Syria Back in the Crosshairs?
Seth DeLong
Enter the Dragon: Will Washington Tolerate a Venezuelan-Chinese
Oil Pact?
Lance Selfa
Stolen Election?: Most Democrats Didn't Even Bother to Inquire
Paul D. Johnson
Mystery Meat: a Right-to-Know About Food Origins
Elisa Salasin
An Open Letter to Jenna Bush, Future Teacher
January 17,
2005
Heather Gray
Misconceptions
About King's Methods for Social Change
Robert Fisk
Hotel Room Journalism: the US Press in Iraq
Dave Lindorff
What the NYT Death Chart Omitted: Civilians Slaughtered by US
Military
Jason Leopold
Sam Bodman's Smokestacks: Bush's Choice for Energy Czar is One
of Texas's Worst Polluters
Gary Leupp
A Message from the Iraqi Resistance
Douglas Valentine
An Act of State? the Execution of Martin Luther King
Harvey Arden
Welcome to Leavenworth: My First Encounter with Leonard Peltier
Greg Moses
King
and the Christian Left: Where Lip Service is Not an Option
January 15
/ 16, 2005
James Petras
The
Kidnapping of a Revolutionary
Robert Fisk
Flying Carpet Airlines: My Return to Baghdad
Ron Jacobs
Unfit for Military Service
Brian Cloughley
Smack Daddies of the Hindu Kush: Afghanistan's Drug Bonanza
Fred Gardner
The Allowable-Quantity Expert
Dr. Susan Block
The Counter-Inaugural Ball: Eros Day, 2005
John Ross
Zapatista Literary Llife
Suzan Mazur
Unspooking Frank Carlucci
M. Shahid Alam
America's New Civilizing Mission
Frederick B. Hudson
Jack Johnson's Real Opponent: "That I Was a Man"
Mike Whitney
Bush's Grand Plan: Incite Civil War in Iraq
Tom Crumpacker
A Constitutional Right to Travel to Cuba
Bob Burton
The Other Armstrong Williams Scandal
John Callender
La Conchita and the Indomitable 82-Year Old
Lila Rajiva
Christian Zionism
Saul Landau
An Imperial Portrait: a Visit to Hearst's Castle
Doug Soderstrom
A Touch of Evil: the Morality of Neoconservatism
Poets' Basement
Davies, Louise, Landau, Albert, Collins and Laymon
January 14,
2005
Robert Fisk
"The
Tent of Occupation"
Lee Sustar
Bush's Social Security Con Job
José
M. Tirado
The Christians I Know
Dave Zirin
The Legacy of Jack Johnson
Sheldon Rampton
Calling John Rendon: a True Tale of "Military Intelligence"
Tracy McLellan
Under the Influence
Yves Engler
The Dictatorship of Debt: the World Bank and Haiti
Tom Barry
Robert
Zoellick: a Bush Family Man
Website of
the Day
Ryan for the Nobel Prize?
January 13,
2005
Mark Chmiel
/ Andrew Wimmer
Hearts
and Minds, Revisited
Joe DeRaymond
The Salvador Option: Terror,
Elections and Democracy
Greg Moses
Every Hero a Killer?...Not
Dave Lindorff
The Great WMD Fraud: Time for an Accounting
Jorge Mariscal
Dr. Galarza v. Alberto Gonzales: Which Way for Latinos?
Christopher Brauchli
Gonzales and the Death Penalty: the Executioner Never Sleeps
Gary Leupp
"Fighting
for the Work of the Lord": Christian Fascism in America
January 12,
2005
Robert Fisk
Fear
Stalks Baghdad
Josh Frank
The
Farce of the DNC Contest
Jack Random
Casualties
of War: the Untold Stories
John Roosa
Aceh's Dual Disasters: the Tsunami and Military Rule
Carol Norris
In the Wake of the Tsunami
Mike Whitney
Pink Slips at CBS
Alan Farago
Can
the Everglades be Saved?
Paul Craig
Roberts
What's
Our Biggest Problem in Iraq...the Insurgency or Bush?
January 11,
2005
Tom Barry
The
US isn't "Stingy"; It's Strategic: Aid as a Weapon
of Foreign Policy
James Hodge
and Linda Cooper
Voice
of the Voiceless: Father Roy Bourgeois and the School of the
the Americas
Linda S. Heard
Farah Radio Break Down: Joseph Farah's Messages of Hate and Homophobia
Derrick O'Keefe
Electoral Gigolo?: Richard Gere and the Occupied Vote
Gila Svirsky
A Tale of Two Elections
Harry Browne
Irish
"Peace Process", RIP
January 10,
2005
Ramzy Baroud
Faith-Based
Disasters: Tsunami Aid and War Costs
Talli Nauman
Killing
Journalists: Mexico's War on a Free Press
Uri Avnery
Sharon's Monologue
Dave Lindorff
Tucker
Carlson's Idiot Wind
Dave Zirin
Randy
Moss's Moondance
Dave Silver
Left Illusions About the Democratic Party
Charles Demers
Plan Salvador for Iraq: Death Squads Come in Waves
William A.
Cook
Causes
and Consequences: Bush, Osama and Israel
January 8 /
9, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Say,
Waiter, Where's the Blood in My Margarita Glass?
John H. Summers
Chomsky
and Academic History
Greg Moses
Getting Real About the Draft
Walter A. Davis
Bible Says: the Psychology of Christian Fundamentalism
Victor Kattan
The EU and Middle East Peace
John Bolender
The Plight of Iraq's Mandeans
Robert Fisk
The Politics of Lebanon
Fred Gardner
Situation NORML
Joe Bageant
The Politics of the Comfort Zone
Mickey Z.
I Want My DDT: Little Nicky Kristof Bugs Out
Ben Tripp
CounterClockwise Evolution
Ron Jacobs
Elvis and His Truck: Out on Highway 61
Saul Landau
Sex
and the Country
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Time to End the Blackout
Ellen Cantarow
NPR's Distortions on Palestine
Richard Oxman
Bageantry Continued
Poets' Basement
Gaffney, Landau, Albert, Collins
January 7,
2005
Omar Barghouti
Slave
Sovereignty: Elections Under Occupation
Kent Paterson
The Framing of Felipe Arreaga: Another Mexican Environmentalist
Arrested
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Old
Vijay Merchant and the Tsunami
David Krieger
Cancel the Inauguration Parties
Gideon Levy
New Year, Old Story
Dave Lindorff
Ohio Protest: First Shot Fired by Congressional Progressives
Christopher
Brauchli
Privatizing the IRS
Roger Burbach
/ Paul Cantor
Bush,
the Pentagon and the Tsunami
January 6,
2005
Brian J. Foley
Gonzales:
Supporting Torture is not His Greatest Sin
Greg Moses
Boot
Up America!: Gen. Helmly's Memo Leaks New Bush Deal
Petras / Chomsky
An
Open Letter to Hugo Chavez
Alan Maass
The Decline of the Dollar
Dave Lindorff
Colin Powell's Selective Sense of Horror
Jenna Orkin
The EPA and a Dirty Bomb: 9/11's Disastrous Precedent
P. Sainath
The
Tsunami and India's Coastal Poor
January 5,
2005
Alan Farago
2004:
An Environmental Retrospective
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Oversight
Detected?: Sen. McCain and the Boeing Tanker Scam
Jean-Guy Allard
Gary Webb: a Cuban Perspective
Fred Gardner
Strutting, Smirking, As If The Mad Plan Was Working
David Swanson
Albert Parsons on the Gallows
Richard Oxman
The Joe Bageant Interview
Bruce Jackson
Death
on the Living Room Floor
January 4,
2005
Michael Ortiz
Hill
Mainlining
Apocalypse
Elaine Cassel
They
Say They Can Lock You Up for Life Without a Trial
Yoram Gat
The
Year in Torture
Martin Khor
Tragic
Tales and Urgent Tasks from the Tsunami Disaster
Gary Leupp
Death
and Life in the Andaman Islands
January 3,
2005
Ron Jacobs
The
War Hits Home
Dave Lindorff
Is
There a Single Senator Who Will Stand Up for Black Voters?
Mike Whitney
The Guantanamo Gulag
Joshua Frank
Greens and Republicans: Strange Bedfellows
Maria Tomchick
Playing Politics with Disaster Aid
Rhoda and Mark
Berenson
Our Daughter Lori: Another Year of Grave Injustice
David Swanson
The Media and the Ohio Recount
Kathleen Christison
Patronizing
the Palestinians
January 1 /
2, 2005
Gary Leupp
Earthquakes
and End Times, Past and Present
Rev. William
E. Alberts
On "Moral Values": Code Words for Emerging Authoritarian
Tendencies
M. Shahid Alam
Testing Free Speech in America
Stan Goff
A Period for Pedagogy
Brian Cloughley
Bush and the Tsunami: the Petty and the Petulant
Sylvia Tiwon
/ Ben Terrall
The Aftermath in Aceh
Ben Tripp
Requiem for 2004
Greg Moses
A Visible Future?
Steven Sherman
The 2004 Said Awards: Books Against Empire
Sean Donahue
The Erotics of Nonviolence
James T. Phillips
The Beast's Belly
David Krieger
When Will We Ever Learn
Poets' Basement
Soderstrom, Hamod, Louise and Albert
December 23,
2004
Chad Nagle
Report
from Kiev: Yushchenko's Not Quite Ready for Sainthood
David Smith-Ferri
The
Real UN Disgrace in Iraq
Bill Quigley
Death
Watch for Human Rights in Haiti
Mickey Z.
Crumbs
from Our Table
Christopher Brauchli
Merck's Merry X-mas
Greg Moses
When
No Law Means No Law
Alan Singer
An
Encounter with Sen. Schumer: a Very Dangerous Democrat
David Price
Social
Security Pump and Dump
Website of the Day
Gabbo Gets Laid
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
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Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
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January 21, 2005
The Right to Resist Occupation
The
Anti-War Movement and the Iraqi Resistance
By
SHARON SMITH
The Iraqi resistance to U.S. occupation
is growing, as is its support among ordinary Iraqis. Iraq's interim
government recently admitted that the insurgency involves at
least 40,000 "hardcore fighters" and up to 200,000
active sympathizers--a far cry from the isolated 5,000 "Baathist
remnants" and "foreign fighters" the Pentagon
initially claimed to be fighting.
A USA Today/Gallup poll
conducted in March concluded, "The insurgents...seem to
be gaining broad acceptance, if not outright support. If the
[pro-U.S.] Kurds, who make up about 13 percent of the poll, are
taken out of the equation, more than half of Iraqis say killing
U.S. troops can be justified in at least some cases."
That was shortly before the
first siege on Falluja, in which U.S. forces killed over 600
civilians before the armed resistance drove them out. Support
for the resistance can only have grown now that U.S. bombs have
flattened Falluja, killing hundreds more civilians and driving
200,000 residents to live in the squalor of refugee camps--while
dispersing the resistance fighters to other localities.
In mid-December, for example,
Knight Ridder reported on a 41-year-old Iraqi woman, Kifah Khudhair,
injured in a car bombing in Baghdad--whose rage was directed
not at the car bombers, but at the Americans. "What can
we do?" her son said. "These things happen every day,
like looting and murder. I am angry at the Americans because
it is all their fault. This is all because of them."
* *
*
IRAQIS SUPPORT the resistance against the U.S. occupation of
their country for one simple reason: they want the Americans
to get out--now.
Yet many in the U.S. antiwar
movement have had difficulty accepting this black-and-white reasoning,
preferring to see the world in shades of gray. "[Iraqi]
jihadis or America's terror-using hypocrites? If we are truly
to stop the terrorists, the world must take sides against both,"
wrote New Left veteran Steve Weissman recently on Truthout.
This argument by Weissman is
faulty on two counts.
First, Weissman equates the
500-pound bombs and high-tech weapons used by the world's biggest
superpower occupying Iraq (at the cost of $7.8 billion per month)
to the rocket-propelled grenades and roadside bombs of those
resisting that occupation. One side aims to control Iraq to fulfill
its grand plan to dominate the Middle East and its oil. The other
merely seeks the right for Iraqis to determine their own future.
Some 100,000 Iraqi civilians
are now estimated dead because of the war and occupation. This
followed the roughly 1 million Iraqis killed from the deprivation
caused by more than a decade of economic sanctions. And this
followed a death toll of up to 200,000 in the 1991 Gulf War.
Choosing sides should not be so difficult.
Without for a moment endorsing the tactic of targeting civilians,
which is used by parts of the resistance, the sheer magnitude
of the death and destruction inflicted by the U.S. upon ordinary
Iraqis should dispel any myth that the two sides in this war
deserve equal condemnation.
Moreover, Weissman accepts
at face value the Bush administration's absurd characterization
of the insurgency as dominated by "terrorists" and
Islamic "extremists."
On December 15, the Boston
Globe published a report by Molly Bingham, who lived from
August 2003 until June 2004 in Baghdad researching the resistance.
She observed, "The composition of the Iraqi resistance is
not what the U.S. administration has been calling it, and the
more it is oversimplified, the harder it is to explain its complexity.
I met Shia and Sunnis fighting together, women and men, young
and old. I met people from all economic, social and educational
backgrounds."
She continued: "The original
impetus for almost all of the individuals I spoke to was a nationalistic
one--the desire to defend their country from occupation, not
to defend Saddam Hussein or his regime." Bingham's conclusion
should help focus the aims of every antiwar activist in the U.S.:
"The resistance will continue until American influence
has disappeared from Iraq's political system."
* *
*
SUPPORT FOR the right of Iraqis
to resist occupation must extend beyond an abstract principle
for the U.S. antiwar movement.
While recognizing "the
right of the Iraqi people to resist as a point of principle,"
Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies--in widely
circulated notes for a speech to the steering committee of United
for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) on December 18--argued, "We
should not call for 'supporting the resistance' because we don't
know who most of them are and what they really stand for, and
because of those we do know, we mostly don't support their social
program beyond opposition to the occupation."
To be meaningful, however,
supporting the "right to resist" must include support
for that resistance once it actually emerges.
Award-winning Indian writer
and global justice activist Arundhati Roy got to the heart of
the issue in a San Francisco speech on August 16: "It is
absurd to condemn the resistance to the U.S. occupation in Iraq,
as being masterminded by terrorists," she said. "After
all, if the United States were invaded and occupied, would everybody
who fought to liberate it be a terrorist?"
If we are waiting for the "ideologically
pure" movement--assuming the unlikely scenario that all
those opposed to the war could agree on one--we could be waiting
forever.
As Roy explained, "Like
most resistance movements, [the Iraqis] combine a motley range
of assorted factions. Former Baathists, liberals, Islamists,
fed-up collaborationists, communists, etc. Of course, it is riddled
with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery and criminality.
But if we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance
will be worthy of our purity.
"Before we prescribe how
a pristine Iraqi resistance must conduct their secular, feminist,
democratic, nonviolent battle, we should shore up our end of
the resistance by forcing the U.S. and its allied governments
to withdraw from Iraq."
Focus on the Global South's Walden Bello made a similar point
in June. "What western progressives forget is that national
liberation movements are not asking them mainly for ideological
or political support," he wrote. "What they really
want from the outside is international pressure for the withdrawal
of an illegitimate occupying power so that internal forces can
have the space to forge a truly national government based on
their unique processes. Until they give up this dream of having
an ideal liberation movement tailored to their values and discourse,
U.S. peace activists will, like the Democrats they often criticize,
continue to be trapped within a paradigm of imposing terms for
other people."
* *
*
THE U.S. antiwar movement should
heed this advice and expend less energy in judging the character
of the Iraqi resistance and more effort on building a visible
resistance to the Iraq occupation from inside the U.S.
When the U.S. invaded Falluja
and the Abu Ghraib torture scandal broke in the spring of 2004,
the U.S. antiwar movement--already ensconced in its misguided
effort to elect prowar John Kerry--declined to mount a visible
response to these and other atrocities committed by the U.S.
in Iraq, effectively sparing the Bush administration from the
need to account for its war crimes.
The main challenge for antiwar
activists in the United States is to rebuild a visible, national
antiwar movement. That means opposing the January 30 election--held
under martial law, which will effectively exclude 50 percent
of the population--and supporting the resistance that exposes
its utter hypocrisy.
Is this strategy too ambitious--too
far to the left for "mainstream" America? That is unlikely,
since a majority of Americans continue to oppose the war.
U.S. troops are also divided,
and we need to actively support those troops who--at great personal
risk--are resisting. The latest is U.S. Army Sgt. Kevin Benderman,
who refused to redeploy to Iraq earlier this month after serving
there from March to September 2003.
"The people that we are
fighting now are for the most part people like you and me, people
who are defending themselves against a superior military force
and fighting to keep that which is rightfully theirs," Benderman
said. He added that the Iraqi people have the right to choose
their own form of government, "just like we did in America
after the revolution."
The antiwar movement must not
lose sight of the fact that its main enemy is at home--and any
resistance to that enemy deserves our unconditional support.
Sharon Smith writes for the Socialist
Worker.
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