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Today's
Stories
February
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Jan.
31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
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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February
2, 2004
The Manners of Their
Deaths
Capital
Punishment in a Smoke-Free Environment
By JUSTIN E.H. SMITH
The third-century historiographer Diogenes Laertius
compiled short biographies of ancient thinkers, in which he idiosyncratically
focused on just two things about them: their ideas, and the manner
of their deaths. For him, the way in which one dies must be interpreted
as a reflection of the way he has lived.
This might seem strange today. We tend
to think that there could be nothing less continuous with our
lives than our deaths. We do great things, we love and fight,
only to find our prostate, say, irrelevantly announcing its malignity
at an hour of its choosing. Sometimes, though, how a person dies
clearly is relevant to our effort to understand who they were.
Old Vikings, who had by blind luck made it through decades of
battle, would arrange for a comrade to cut their heads off, rather
than endure the shame of dying in bed. And we infer from this
that they were valorous. In other cases, even where the death
is far from poetically just, it can teach us a valuable lesson.
To learn, for example, that the esteemed Dr. Atkins died after
slipping on ice forces us to see his most valuable contribution
to the world in a different light: however soundly you may eat,
you may still be taken out by something stupid, at any time.
And a moral lesson is learned: don't look to a diet, or anything
for that matter that's in your power to control or prevent, as
a source of salvation. Diogenes was on to something after all.
And perhaps it is in just such a third-century
spirit that Roberto Arguelles and Troy Michael Kell, two confessed
murderers scheduled for execution in Utah, last May requested
that the state arrange for death by firing-squad. Utah is one
of the few states to keep this option open, and one of the few
to allow death-row inmates a choice at all. Perhaps these men
wish to die in keeping with the way they have lived. What could
be more appropriate?
Yet the state is embarrassed. Why? As
Utah representative Sheryl Allen says of the practice, "it's
a magnet for a lot of undesirable attention. It carries negative
connotations of the old west if you will. Other methods of execution,
while people absolutely do not, may not support capital punishment,
they don't seem to attract the attention like a firing squad."
And as the Salt Lake Tribune opined on October 2, 2003, "The
so-called Wild- West aspect of a shooting death attracts scores
of journalists from around the world to Utah, members said, while
focusing undue attention and undeserved sympathy on the condemned
killer."
In an earlier article (January
19, 2004), I suggested that the current system of punishment
in America is in a strange and paradoxical bind: society has
some sense that punishment should be unpleasant, yet we are forced
to temper the urge to punish by an earlier era's commitment to
human rights, and to the optimistic and utopian goal of correcting
whatever ails the deviant. We long to punish, but can only do
so at present within the bounds of civility and, however empirically
unsubstantiated, under the banner of correction.
Interestingly, the same paradox binds
our society even in its approach to that ultimate punishment,
execution. We may kill, but we mustn't hurt.
It is curious that every generation exhibits
shock, feigned or genuine, at the way in which those before them
went about their human sacrifices. Famously, the guillotine was
devised for purportedly humanitarian ends; those responsible
for the Jacobin Terror could go about their business with clear
consciences, since, in their scientific and enlightened age,
humanity had finally devised a way of executing, so it was reported,
without pain. But still, the sight of blood suggested all sorts
of unwanted affinities to actual violence, and the Terror went
down in history as, in a word, terrible.
Hanging seemed a clean and simple solution,
no blood, no screams. But still, who in our America, today's
America, has not seen the cinematic depiction of a hanging and
recoiled with horror at how barbaric they were in communist Poland
(Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue 5), in the U. S. of the early
1960s (Lars von Trier's Dancer in the Dark), or out on the wild
frontier (any number of spaghetti westerns)? Von Trier has boldly
quipped that, however opposed he is to capital punishment, he
can't help but admit that executions are God's gift to directors.
They provide the viewer a convenient occasion for intense empathy.
In the case of poor Bjork's hanging, in particular, in the curious
antiquatedness of the whole apparatus and the vintage dress of
the spectators, we are invited to empathize without worrying
that this obscenity might be anything more than a period piece.
Certainly, we comfort ourselves, there may still be capital punishment,
but we don't chop off people's heads, and we don't hang people
by the neck until dead. Whatever we do _and please don't let
us hear the details--we go to great lengths to ensure that cruelty
and unusualness are avoided, that the execution proceeds in accord
with contemporary standards of decency.
Until very recently, at the Website
of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, we were invited
to learn what executed prisoners for the past several years had
requested as their last meals. Fried okra, macaroni and cheese,
a six-pack of Mr. Pibb. Comfort food, as they say. We also learned
from the site of those cases where the state had been unable
to fulfill the requests. For example, demands for cigarettes
are routinely turned down, since, we learn, this product is prohibited
by the Department. The state, evidently, cares enough to ensure
that its death-row inmates are kept safe from the deleterious
effects of tobacco.
Anybody who has ever yearned for a cigarette,
and felt the relief that comes with taking a deep and drawn-out
drag, will affirm that there's something eternal about the moment.
Though it may be taking time away from the end of my life, for
now at least it is liberating me from time altogether. It is
in this sense that, as Richard Klein says, cigarettes are sublime.
Likely, such an understanding of the cigarette's power was behind
the ritual, in less hypocritical days, of offering a final smoke
to the condemned. In spite of his inevitable fate in the temporal
order of things, the cigarette and its moment of eternity offered
the closest thing the prisoner was going to get to a way out.
I hate capital punishment. It's revolting,
and I'm kept awake at night knowing that it's going on. But I
hate so much more the knowledge that a condemned man is denied
his right to smoke, in order that his executioners may pretend
that what is taking place is a normal part of the smooth and
sterile procedure-following of a healthy and modern institution.
If it's going to happen, blood needs to splatter, the heavens
might do their part by trembling a bit, and all those complicit
deserve at least a bit of second- hand smoke in their eyes.
Justin E. H. Smith teaches philosophy at Concordia University in
Montreal, Canada. He can be reached at: justismi@alcor.concordia.ca
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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