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Today's Stories October 31, 2007 Bill Quigley New Orleans' Broken Criminal Justice System October 30, 2007 David Price Pilfered Scholarship Devastates Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual M. Shahid Alam The Pakistan Question Andy Worthington The Epiphany of Matthew Waxman: a Government Insider Turns Against Gitmo Patrick Cockburn The Bicycle Bomber of Baquba Anthony Papa The Twisted Logic of Drug Laws Floyd Rudmin What "All Options are on the Table" Really Means Sherwood Ross Giuliani and Torture Website of the Day The Worst Lobby? You Decide   October 29, 2007 Lisa Hajjar Inside Israel's Military Courts Joe DeRaymond The Politics of Lethal Injections Patrick Cockburn The High Stakes in Iraqi Kurdistan Isabella Kenfield / Roger Burbach Corporate Murder in Brazil Fred Gardner The Frivolous Investigation of Dr. Sterner Farzana Versey Caricaturing Islam Stephen Fleischman The Greening of the Oligarchy Marcelle Cendrars The Congressional Rip Cord Eamonn McCann Dan Keating, the Last of the Republican Irreconcilables Martha Rosenberg For Halloween, Ann Coulter Dresses as .... Ann Coulter! Website of the Day Campaign 2008   October 27 / 28, 2007 Alexander Cockburn So Much for Islamo-Fascism Awareness Jeffrey St. Clair The Dam That Isn't There James Bovard Breaking Down an Innocent Man: The FBI's Right to Threaten Torture Ralph Nader Beyond the Rule of Law M. Reza Pirbhai The Wahhabis are Coming, the Wahhabis are Coming! Robert Sandels Pay the Invaders! Cuba, Claims and Confiscations Jacob G. Hornberger Ruling By Decree Missy Beattie The Arsonists in the West Wing John Ross U.S. Eyes on Oaxaca Robert Fantina Condi Rice, the Imperial Cheerleader Ron Jacobs Labor at the Crossroads Ali Moayedian In Search of Logic About Iran David Michael Green What If We Had a President Who Didn't Give a Damn About Terrorism? Poets Basement Block, Davies and Ford Website of the Day Bring 'Em Home: a Music Video   October 26, 2007 Brian Cloughley Revenging Bloodshed Saul Landau Portrait of Rudy Ahmad Al-Akras Getting Justice in the HLF Case Franklin Lamb Does "Loving" Lebanon Mean Never Having to Say You're Sorry? Mike Whitney Murdoch's Cuckoo's Nest Dave Lindorff Home of the Brave? Reducing US Casualties By Killing More Civilians Alan Farago A Castro Behind Every Bush Yifat Susskind Conscripting Feminism into the War on Terror Website of the Day Dead Life in a Political Prison October 25, 2007 Jeffrey St. Clair / Joshua Frank Iraq's Environmental Crisis Manuel Garcia, Jr. Homes of the Crash Test Dummies Paul Craig Roberts The Fraudulent War on Terror Col. Dan Smith The Politics of Paranoia: Jane Harman's War on the First Amendment Alan Farago The Way to Paradise? Chris Kutalik The Lesson of the Chrysler Rebels Brian McKinlay John Howard and the Curse of Bush Cindy Sheehan Pete, Nancy, George and WW III Website of the Day Support the America's Program!   October 24, 2007 Natalie Washington-Weik White Fantasies About Race-Based Intelligence Andy Worthington The Guantánamo Suicides Michael Birmingham What Happened in Nahr Al Bared? Corporate Crime Reporter The Nuclear Democrats Tariq Ali Bush's Cuba Detour Farzana Versey Imagining Serfdom in a Scarf Dave Zirin White Noise James Murren What "Support Our Troops" Means Todd Chretien Looking Reality in the Face Martha Rosenberg What Came First, the Chicken or the Cage? Website of the Day Hillary Clinton on Nuclear Power   October 23, 2007 Ralph Nader Bush's Catastrophic Rhetoric Lawrence R. Velvel Goldsmith Stands Convicted--By His Own Mouth: How a Harvard Law Professor Justified Rendition at the Bush Justice Dept. Vijay Prashad The Nuke Deal is Dead Bonnie Bricker / Adil E. Shamoo The True Cost of War for Oil Dave Lindorff Christopher Dodd's Make or Break Moment Mike Whitney The Big Squeeze Farzana Versey Race with the Devil Stanley Heller / Ben George Something New from the Antiwar Movement Marcelle Cendrars You Too Can Confront the Holy Executive Regan Boychuk Burma and Haiti: Comparing the Media Response Website of the Day King Corn   October 22, 2007 Ishmael Reed Should Blacks Go Green? Marjorie Cohn Mukasey and the Constitution: Another Loyal Bushie Rannie Amiri Is There a Method to Bush's Middle East Madness? Diane Farsetta Time to Pay for Payola: the FCC and Pundit-for-Hire Armstrong Williams Todd Alan Price Renewing No Child Left Behind: A Hurricane Katrina Aimed at Public Education Robert Jensen The Quagmire of Masculinity Stephen Lendman The UAW Leadership Sells Out Its Workers Jemima Khan The Kleptocrat in an Hermes Headscarf Sunsara Taylor David Horowitz Can't Handle the Truth Binoy Kampmark No Ideas, Please: the Australian Elections Website of the Day Support the Center for International Policy     October 20 / 21, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Man Who Builds Hillaryworld Tariq Ali A Massacre Foretold Jeffrey St. Clair Greetings from Echo Park Andy Worthington The Shame of Diego Garcia Mike Whitney Housing Flameout Daniel Wolff Play It As It Lays David Rosen Deviants on Parade: Folsom St. Fair and America's 4th Sexual Revolution Saul Landau David and Goliath in Iraq Ron Jacobs COINTELPRO and the Panthers Robert Fantina The Strange Love of Mitt Romney and Bob Jones David Heleniak Erring on the Side of Hidden Harm Joe Allen Hoffa Brown-Nosing at UPS Prairie Miller Lions for Lambs Poets' Basement Gibbons, Holt and Buknatski Website of the Weekend Crash!   October 19, 2007 John Ross Che's Mexican Legacy Sheldon Rampton Shared Values Revisited: a Case Study in the Limits of Propaganda Rahul Mahajan A Tale of Two Atrocities: Blackwater and Haditha Devra Davis Deadly Secrets: Chemical Pollution and Cancer Christopher Brauchli Blasphemous Science Wadner Pierre Haiti After the Deluge Bill Quigley Jailed for Justice Website of the Day Textbook Sticker Shock   October 18, 2007 Saree Makdisi Academic Freedom is at Risk Meg Dwyer What I Learned from 9/11: Who Wouldn't Want Us Dead? Alevtina Rea Sketches of Russian Life Norman Solomon The United States of Violence Kristoffer Larsson Something is Rotten in Sweden Harvey Wasserman Nukes are Back and So are We Website of the Day Eve Ensler: "A Filibuster Would Stop This War"   October 17, 2007 Steve Niva Counter-Insurgency, American-Style Andy Worthington The Case of Mohamed Jawad Alan Farago The Credit Shock Russell Mokhiber The New Billionaire-Criminal Class Sharon Smith Democrats, AWOL When It Mattered Mike Whitney Time for the Banks to Face the Hangman Robert Fantina Iraq, Iran and the US: Business as Usual Chris Irwin Where Have All the Rednecks Gone? Website of the Day Sex Ed at Oral Roberts University October 16, 2007 Peter Linebaugh Doris Lessing and the Dynamite Prize Paul Findley Follow the Leader: The Open Secret About the Israel Lobby Robert Bryce Inconvenient Corrections: Al Gore's Wacky Facts Uri Avnery The Mother of All Pretexts Paul Craig Roberts The Iraqi Genocide Ray McGovern What Did Nancy Pelosi Know About NSA Spying and When Did She Know It? Norman Solomon The Pro-War Undertow of the Blackwater Scandal Martha Rosenberg The Curse of Cymbalta William S. Lind Out of the Frying Pan Joel S. Hirschborn Time to Boycott Voting Website of the Day Pipeline Through Paradise: Big Oil's Arctic Play         Subscribe Online

October 31, 2007 Bookending the Communist Party in France The Second Death of Guy Môquet By V. G. SMITH Last week President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed the wish that Lycée instructors read the celebrated letter of Guy Môquet on October 21 to commemorate the anniversary of that young student's death in WWII. At 17 years, Moquet was the youngest of 27 hostages executed by a German firing squad on October 22, 1941 in reprisal for the assassination of a German officer. A collaborationist French official chose the hostages because they were Communists and their selection would spare the lives of "good Frenchman". Moquet's famous letter from the prison camp at Châteaubriant was addressed to his mother, brother, and father, and expressed his willingness to die with his companions, having "done his best to follow the way that you have laid out for me"concluding " [I] kiss you with all this child's heart of mine. Be brave!" He was shot along with Charles Michels, the Communist Deputy of Paris. Surprisingly, or maybe not so, there was a wave of protest by teachers against the reading of this letter. In the end some read it, and others ignored the wish of the President. What are notable are the terms of opposition. Letters to the newspapers ranted against his 'heart of a child', term used by Môquet to his parents, as 'pitiable immaturity'. His stoicism in facing a firing squad seems to count little with the current public. And others wrote: 'What purpose does it serve to inculcate the young with values contradicting reality. Let him, seriously, rest in peace, 6 feet under the earth, bones in a coffin, and stop this two-bit sentimentalism. ' Marie Lavin, former prison colleague of Moquet's saw its inclusion each fall at the return to school as part of the reunion of pals, souvenirs of the summer at the beach, and 'oh yes, the letter of Guy Moquet's is coming''. She characterized this as 'the second death of Guy Môquet'. Lavin's letter inspired more responses. One wrote: 'I will not read the letter out of respect for his memory and respect for my students.' And another suggested: 'To read a text detached from a context is stupidity and a good means of dehumanizing [students].' And of course several accused Sarkozy of calculation. What does this mean? Is there such disillusionment with the Left that even a young wartime victim cannot be mentioned? Even de Gaulle had called Môquet 'a martyr'. Astute President Sarkozy probably thought that there was no risk in celebrating a martyr from the safely dead Communist Party of France. This, in contrast to the fertile field of the Socialist Party, where he has poached Dominique Strauss-Kahn for the International Monetary Fund, the elfin Attali of micro-economics for a commission on growth, the febrile Bernard Kouchner for Foreign Minister, and others. The PS Chair François Holland has not yet been summoned, but now that Cecilia Sarkozy is divorcing Sarkozy, as Sêgolène Royal shed Holland, the agile Sarkozy might see something in a How It Feels to be Dumped study, but nothing yet. After WWII the French Communist Party (PCF) was the strongest in France, gaining 26 percent of the vote in the first post-war election. It continued to be an influence, regularly drawing over 20 percent. But its decline, attributed by some to the Stalinist allegiance of the party and its chief, Robert Hue, brought it only 3.4 percent of the presidential vote by 2002, In this year's contest, centered on Ségolène Royal as the PS candidate and Nicolas Sarkozy as the UMP choice, the Communist candidate Marie-George Buffet received 1.93% of the vote. The long decline of the French Communist party seems to have culminated in rejection of its candidates and in dismissal of its former heroes. Except for artist-heroes, apparently. The long lines I joined winding from the Grand Palais to the Seine are testament to the admiration for the great artist, ego and Communist, Gustave Courbet. In the early days of the Second Republic and the Second Empire (1848 to 1870) Courbet enjoyed fame and even notoriety (because of his near-pornographic female studies), but his political actions during the Paris Commune of the 1870s condemned him to a grim end. For his role in tearing down the Vendôme column, Courbet was judged guilty, banished, and fined 300,000 francs, payable at a rate of 10,000 per year to begin in January 1, 1878, a penalty he avoided by closing his eyes permanently on December 31, 1877. Courbet's trial was not helped by his refusal of the Legion of Honor in 1870, or by his open letter to the German army advising them to retreat before the resistance of Parisians rallied by the Commune, to which he had been elected. They could not prevail against such Parisians, he thought. How wrong he was. The Versailles men, allying with the Germans, occupied Paris, and slaughtered 20,000 Parisian resisters. The documentation of this carnage is shown in contemporary paintings and photographs of stark realism, mirroring Courbet's savage and prescient images of the 1860s: dead foxes hanging from trees, a slaughtered stag likewise upended while dogs lick its dripping blood, or later, the couched symbols of the bizarre canvases of gutted fish, Les Truites, which he painted after his conviction, The exhibition at the Grand Palais covers Courbet's work from beginning to end, starting with a room full of self-portraits, either as madman or handsome artist, from the time he came to Paris in 1839 to his exile in Switzerland in 1874. The Burial at Ornans of 1849, with its open grave in the center and its motley crowd of black-coated locals, ugly faces, lost dogs and ominous skies, established him as a new kind of painter as well as a subject of popular cartoons, as did his voluptuous canvases of sleepy-eyed prostitutes, intertwined nude female lovers, and the scandalous full-color study of female genitalia called L' Origine du Monde, secretly owned by the French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, but now publicly exhibited. The French public views both politics and pornography with equal interest. The fire of Courbet and his comrades, as the passion of Moquet and his companions, flickers faintly now. V G Smith is a Professor of Art from CUNY who publishes Art Criticism and Design History. Her latest book is Forms in Modernism: A Visual Set, was published by Watson-Guptill in 2004 Your Ad Here

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