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June 17, 2002
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
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Published March 15, 2002
Read Whiteout and Find Out
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
and St. Clair
Buy
This Explosive
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
|
June 17,
2002
George
W Bush:
The
Man is Stupid
by Joan Smith
The Independent
I have lost count of the times I have been ticked
off in recent months, sometimes by quite senior politicians,
for suggesting that George W Bush is a complete idiot. He is
nowhere near as stupid as he seems, I have been told, a proposition
that has some force solely because it is hard to imagine any
world leader being afflicted with quite the degree of bovine
incomprehension that the President habitually displays. On Monday,
for instance, he was on cracking form, announcing in halting
English you'd think he'd be fluent by now that a dangerous terrorist
had been detained and "is now off the streets, where he
should be".
As so often with Bush's pronouncements,
what he appeared to say that terrorists should be on US streets
was the opposite of what he meant. Unfair, unfair, his defenders
will say: we have never claimed that our man is an accomplished
public speaker. Fine, but my other reaction to the announcement
I am being unusually frank here was, "You credulous git,
do you believe every single thing anybody in the administration
tells you?" US intelligence agencies are trying to deflect
accusations that they failed to pick up warnings of last September's
suicide attacks and desperately need the kind of crowing headlines
"US foils al-Qa'ida 'dirty bomb' plot" that the announcement
prompted.
But the administration was soon backtracking,
accused of exaggerating the importance of a US citizen known
as Abdullah al-Mujahir, a former Chicago gang member who converted
to Islam and changed his name in prison. The deputy defense secretary,
Paul Wolfowitz, admitted "there was not an actual plan"
to set off a radioactive device in Washington, and it now seems
that al-Mujahir's research had not gone much further than surfing
the internet. Nor is it clear why he was arrested while on a
reconnaissance trip to the US from Pakistan on 8 May, after being
under 24-hour surveillance since February, when further observation
might have yielded valuable information about al-Qa'ida associates
.
Meanwhile, a terrorist whose plans were
at a rather more advanced stage succeeded in bombing the US consulate
in Karachi on Friday, killing 11 people. None of this seems to
have fazed the President, whose announcement about al-Mujahir
coincided with a decision to transfer him to military custody,
thus avoiding the embarrassment of having the more lurid allegations
against him tested in open court. Bush's Defense Secretary, Donald
Rumsfeld, was not so lucky, having been foolish enough to make
grand claims about al-Qa'ida operating in the disputed border
territory of Kashmir without a shred of evidence. Rumsfeld's
announcement during a visit to India on Wednesday collapsed under
questioning from journalists in Islamabad. "I don't have
evidence and the US doesn't have evidence of al-Qa'ida in Kashmir,"
he admitted.
That is not to say I underestimate the
threat from Islamist groups whose motivation is as much their
complex and ambivalent relationship with secular modernity as
the genuine grievances the US's uncritical support for Israel
and undemocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia felt by moderate
opinion in Arab countries. But what I am suggesting is that the
response of Mr Bush and leading figures in his administration,
with the exception of his sadly marginalized Secretary of State,
Colin Powell, is akin to a bunch of ham actors staging a noisy
hunt for pantomime villains. Think about the search for Osama
bin Laden and the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, whose whereabouts
appear to be as great a mystery to Bush, Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney
and John Ashcroft as they us.
We, however, are not supposed to know
that kind of stuff. It is not your job, or mine, come to that,
to have advance knowledge of terrorist outrages. But we are entitled,
in a world where what the US President says may affect all our
lives, to expect something better than the overblown claims and
ignominious climbdowns that are the hallmark of this ignorant,
inept administration. Frantic displays of patriotism, random
round-ups of hundreds of foreigners and unverifiable claims about
imminent terrorist attacks cannot conceal the fact that its members
do not know what they are doing; any day now, I expect to hear
that Switzerland, or perhaps Belgium, has been added to the axis
of evil. It is not just Mr Bush, as I naively hoped, who is absolutely
clueless.
Joan Smith
writes for the Independent.
Today's
Features
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
David Vest
Shut Up
and Clap
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