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/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's
Stories
May
7, 2004
Robert
Fisk
An Illegal and Immoral War
Ron
Jacobs
UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So
May
6, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
They Did It for Jessica: Smeared with
Shit; Kicked to Death
Kathy
Kelly
May Day in Pekin Prison: Prison Labor
for the War Machine
Werther
The Sunk Cost Fallacy: War as Vegas
Casino Game
Lawrence
Ferlinghetti
Totalitarian Democracy
Robert
Fisk
"Smoke Him": Video Shows Wounded
Men Being Shot by US Helicopter
John
Janney
Torturing the Way to Freedom?
Christopher
Ketcham
Outlaw Heterosexual Marriage Now!
Alan
Farago
Dead Oceans: So Long, Thanks for the Fish
Sam
Hamod
Bush on Arab TV: Worthless and Demeaning
James
Brooks
Sullen Spring
William
S. Lind
On the Brink of Defeat in Iraq
May
5, 2004
Maj.
Gen. Antonio M. Taguba
Complete US Army Report on Abuse of
Iraqi Prisoners
Kathleen
and Bill Christison
Kerry: a Lost Cause for Progressives?
Will
Youmans
Deal with the Devil: a Palestinian
Zionist and the End of the World
Patrick
B. Barr
Terrorists R Us: the Powerful are Exempt from the Label
Lawrence
Magnuson
Nightline's All-American Morgue
Greg
Moses
Pocketbook of Denuded Ideals
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Tormenting Prisoners, Torturing
Truth
Lee
Ballinger
Cinco de Mayo and Unity
Gilbert
Achcar
Bush's Cakewalk into the Iraq Quaqmire
Website
of the Day
Operation Phoenix & Iraq
May
4, 2004
Human
Rights Watch
A Timeline of Torture and Abuse Allegations
and Responses
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Privatized Torture
David
Peterson
CBS, Self-Censorship & Iraq
Barry
Lando
CACI's Private Torture Chambers
Patrick
Cockburn
Torture: Iraqis Disgusted, But Not Surprised
Dr.
Susan Block
Indecent Insurgents: Watch What You Say
Fidel
Castro
A Mindless, Unnecessary War
Mike
Whitney
Empire of Torture
Sonali
Kolhatkar
How to Stop the War: Demonstrate Against
John Kerry
Josh
Frank
The Lost Sierra Club
Stan
Goff
The Role: Another Open Letter to US Troops in Iraq
Agustin
Velloso
Spare Us Your Disgusting Ethics
Stew
Albert
American Know-How
Website
of the Day
Scenes from a Cover-Up
May
3, 2004
Virginia
Tilley
Let the Wall of Silence Fall
May
1 / 2, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
An Army in Disgrace, a Policy
in Tatters, the Real Prospect of Defeat
Robert
Fisk
"Good Guys" Who Can Do No
Wrong
Alexander
Cockburn
Watching Niagara: Stupid Leaders,
Useless Spies, Angry World
Heather
Williams
Gringo, We're Going Home: Latin
American Troops Flee Iraq
Diane
Rejman
An Army Vet on Torture in Iraq:
Abu Ghraib as My Lai?
Diane
Christian
Blood Spilling: Osama, Bush and
Sharon Speak the Same Language
Patrick
Cockburn
Seems Like Old Times in Fallujah
Dave
Lindorff
Bush's Torturous Logic: Shocked,
Shocked, Shocked
Chris
Floyd
Suicide Bomber: Neocons, Nihilists
and Annihilation
April
29 / 30, 2004
Dave
Zirin
A Pawn in Their Game: the Unlonesome
Death of Pat Tillman
Kathy
Kelly
The Warden's Tour
Greg
Weiher
Fallujah and the Warsaw Ghetto: the
Banality of Evil
Michael
S. Ladah
Terrorism and Assassination: the
Ultimate Depception
Patrick
Cockburn
The Fallujah Mutinies
April
28, 2004
Christopher
Brauchli
Meet Congressman Know-Nothing:
Tom Tancredo
Wendy
Brinker
The Politics of the Numb
Faisal
Kutty
The Dirty Work of Canadian Intelligence
John
Chuckman
Seeking the Evil One
Mike
Whitney
Flag-Draped Coffins and the Seattle Times
Tom
Mountain
Rwanda and the F***** Word
Graeme
Greenback
The Iraqi Alamo: a CNN/CIA Production
Tracy
McLellan
The War Comes Home
M.
Junaid Alam
We are the Barbarians
William
Loren Katz
Iraq, the US and an Old Lesson
April 27, 2004
James
Davis
The Colombia 3 Acquitted
Dave
Lindorff
Chalabi as Prosecutor
Bruce
Schneier
Terrorist Threats and Political
Gain
Cockburn
/ Sengupta
British Generals Resist Calls for
More Troops to Aid Americans in Iraq
Walt
Brasch
Presidential Letters: The Day I
Was Asked to Feed an Elephant
Saul
Landau
The Empire in Denial and the Denial
of Empire
April 26, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Crossing the Shia Line: US Troops
Prepare to Enter Najaf
Wayne
Madsen
Trading Places: Will the US Go the Way of the USSR?
Grover
Furr
Protest, Rebellion, Commitment
Elaine
Cassel
Lies About the Patriot Act
Mickey
Z.
Inspired by Pat Tillman?
Greg
Moses
Bremer's De-De-Ba'athjfication Gambit
Gila
Svirsky
Anarchy in Our Souls
Uri
Avnery
Vanunu and the Terrible Secret
April 24 / 25, 2004
William
A. Cook
Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry
and Bush Melt into One
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank
Brandy
Baker
A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So
Robert
Fisk
A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free
Speech
Ben
Tripp
October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios
Nelson
Valdés
"Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Return to the Future
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Killed Pat Tillman
Mark
Scaramella
Does Anybody Know Anything?
Patrick
Cockburn
The Return of Saddam's Generals
Gary
Engler
Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas
Col.
Dan Smith
Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush
Greg
Weiher
Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam...
Elaine
Cassel
Life on the Outside: a Review
Vanessa
Jones
Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney
Jim
French
Agriculture's Bullied Market
Hammond
Guthrie
Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles
Poets'
Basement
Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella
April 23, 2004
Ron
Jacobs
The Only Solution is Immediate Withdrawal
Dave
Lindorff
Imagination Deficit Disorder
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Contractors and Mercenaries: the Rising Corporate Military Monster
Norman
Solomon
Country Joe Band, 2004: "What Are We Fighting For?"
Cynthia
McKinney
All Things Are Not Equal: the Perils of Globalization
CounterPunch
Wire
A Bitch Called Wanda
Karyn
Strickler
Sierra Club, Inc.
Hammond
Guthrie
Yellow Caked in the Face
Paul
de Rooij
Graveyard of Justifications: Glossary
of the Iraqi Occupation
April 22, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
When Terror Came to Basra: "I
Saw a Minibus of Children on Fire"
Tanya
Reinhart
The Wall Behind Disengagement
Lance
Selfa
Why is Kucinich Still in the Race?
Josh
Frank
Street Fighting Man? Kucinich's Pulled Punches
Sen.
Robert Byrd
Bush Owes America Answers on Iraq
William
S. Lind
Why We Get It Wrong
Mickey
Z.
Undoing the Latches
Robert
Jensen
Why They Fast: Remembering the Victims of the World Bank
John
L. Hess
The New York Times from 30,000 Feet
April
21, 2004
Gary
Leupp
Yeats on Iraq
Alfredo
Castro
Colombia's Forgotten Prisoners
Dr.
Susan Block
Bush's Taliban Drug Deal
William
A. Cook
George 1 to George 2
Jack
Random
Iraq and Vietnam
Jean-Guy
Allard
Alarcon Meets the Editors
Mike
Whitney
Charade in the Desert
Bill
Christison
Only Major Policies Changes Can
Help Washington Now
April 20, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Bush and Kerry Share a Problem
Stan
Cox
Wal-Mart's Magic Numbers
Bruce
Anderson
On Listening to Air America
Joseph
Kalvoda
Czech Mate for Condi
Greg
Moses
Yesterday's Intelligence
Stan
Goff
The Democrats and Iraq
Website
of the Day
Santorum Happens
April 19, 2004
Kurt
Nimmo
The "Central Hand" of the
Resistance
Mike
Whitney
Bob Woodward's Imperial Trifles
Douglas
Valentine
52 Pick-Up and the 100-to-1
Rule
John
Chuckman
The Sharon Annex: Evil Does Often
Triumph
Doug
Giebel
Welcome to the Club
Rahul
Mahajan
Hospital Closings and War Crimes
April
16 / 18, 2004
Robert
Fisk
Bush Legitimizes Terror
Saul
Landau
Subverting Brazil and Cuba
Dave
Lindorff
Paying for War: $2,150 per Family
and Counting
Brandy
Baker
Fallujah's Collateral Damage
Mickey
Z.
The Left Attacks from the Right
Bruce
Jackson
The Bush Press Conference: Gott Mit
Uns
Norman
Solomon
How the "NewsHour" Changed
History
Alexander
Cockburn
Bush, Kerry and Empire
April
15, 2004
Greg
Moses
Follow the Families, Not the Script
Virginia
Tilley
The Carnage According to Gen. Kimmitt:
Just Change the Channel
Ron
Jacobs
They Coulda Been Champions of the
World: Hurricane Carter and Ron Kovic
Michael
Neumann
A Happy Compromise: Hate Crimes
Reporting in the Toronto Globe and Mail
April
14, 2004
Tom
Reeves
Return to Haiti: an American Learning
Zone
Reza
Fiyouzat
Japan and Iraq
Ron
Jacobs
What Bush Really Said
Diane
Christian
The Real Passion
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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May
7, 2004
This War and
Racism
Media Denial
in Overdrive
By NORMAN SOLOMON
Among the millions of words that have
appeared in the U.S. press since late April about abuse and torture
at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, one has been notably missing:
Racism.
Overall, when it comes to racial
aspects, the news coverage is quite PC - as in Pentagon Correct.
The outlook is "apple pie" egalitarian, with the media
picture including high-profile officers who are African-American
and Latino. Meanwhile, inside the policy arena, Colin Powell
and Condoleezza Rice are frequently in front of cameras to personify
Uncle Sam in blackface.
The U.S. government doesn't
drop bombs on people because of their race. Washington's geopolitical
agendas lead to military actions. But racial biases make the
war process easier when the people being killed and maimed aren't
white people. An oversize elephant in the American media's living
room is a reality that few journalists talk about in public:
The USA keeps waging war on countries where the victims resemble
people who often experience personal and institutional racism
in the United States.
In the American media coverage
of the uproar after release of the Abu Ghraib photos, one of
the only references to race was fleeting and dismissive, midway
through a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on May 3: "So
far the alleged grotesqueries are more analogous to the nightmares
that occur occasionally at American prisons, when rogue and jaded
guards freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates. The crime,
then, first appears not so much a product of endemic ethnic,
racial, or religious hatred, as the unfortunate cargo of penal
institutions, albeit exacerbated by the conditions of war, the
world over."
That essay, by the Hoover Institution's
Victor Davis Hanson, typifies media denial about what's happening
in the hellish American cells populated so disproportionately
by low-income blacks and Latinos. In the world of the Journal
editorial page's convenient fantasy, guards "occasionally"
choose to "freelance to intimidate and humiliate inmates."
In the world of prisoners' inconvenient reality, guards frequently
intimidate, humiliate - and brutalize.
Media denial lets the U.S.
military - and the U.S. incarceration industry - off the hook.
Yet it's significant that a man implicated as a ringleader in
the Abu Ghraib crimes, Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, "had also
worked for six years as a guard for the Virginia Department of
Corrections," according to Seymour Hersh's article in the
May 10 edition of The New Yorker. A special agent in the U.S.
Army's Criminal Investigation Division, Scott Bobeck, testified
that Sgt. Frederick and a corporal apparently "were put
in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge
of how things were supposed to be run."
That knowledge came from working
as guards in an American system of incarceration that now has
2,033,000 people behind bars - 63 percent of them black or Latino.
With racial minorities vastly over-represented in federal and
state prisons and local jails, such numbers reflect profound
institutional biases that converge at the intersection of racism
and unequal justice based on economic class.
A public-interest group, The
Sentencing Project, notes that "black males have a 32 percent
chance of serving time in prison at some point in their lives;
Hispanic males have a 17 percent chance; white males have a 6
percent chance." Most of the people sentenced to prison
are poor, while the affluent and wealthy are very infrequent
guests.
Conditions are often inherently
abusive behind bars. Many prisoners must cope with violence and
duress. At the Stop Prisoner Rape organization, executive director
Lara Stemple points out: "For women, whose abusers are often
corrections officers, the rates of sexual assault are as high
as one in four in some facilities."
The same government that runs
this prison system also conducts foreign policy that during the
past four decades has resulted in bombing and invading the Dominican
Republic, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan
and Iraq. More circumscribed Pentagon missions landed in Somalia
and Haiti. In 1999, a major <U.S.-led> bombing campaign
caused enormous suffering among civilians in Yugoslavia. Sudden
missile strikes hit Libya and Sudan. And <U.S.-funded>
military forces on several continents - from Nicaragua, El Salvador
and Guatemala to Angola to Indonesia - took many lives.
Generally, with the exception
of Serbs, the victims of Pentagon firepower have been people
of color who've looked different than the USA's white majority
and power structure. In the United States, racial biases have
helped to grease the war machinery.
We may want to view the large
number of Latino and black GIs as reassurance that U.S. warfare
is race-neutral. But the decision to launch a war is hardly democratic.
Soldiers, by definition, follow orders that result from a political
process: skewed by the inequities of power and the effects of
prejudice.
For troops on the ground, racial
bias - objectification of "the other" - can have magnified
impacts in an environment of high stress and danger. As author
Iris Chang has documented in The Rape of Nanking, when Japan's
troops committed atrocities on a massive scale against civilians
in 1937, those crimes were fueled by virulent anti-Chinese racism
and indoctrination touting Japanese racial superiority.
We might prefer to believe
that racism plays no part in the politics and media coverage
of U.S. foreign policy. But that's about as plausible as the
claim that racism plays no part in American society.
Trying to calm outrage by speaking
to viewers of Arabic-language television on May 5, George W.
Bush said the people of Iraq "must understand that what
took place in that prison does not represent the America that
I know." But as governor and president, he has rebuffed
every plea to ameliorate the flagrant injustices and brutalities
inside the courtrooms and prisons of Texas and the entire country.
Bush "knows" - or at least publicly admits to knowing
- only what he wants to acknowledge.
During the few minutes allotted
to him as a guest on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" program,
the executive director of Amnesty International USA explained
that efforts had been made to alert top Washington officials
to barbaric treatment of Iraqi prisoners in U.S. custody. During
the May 3 broadcast, William Schulz said: "Close to a year
ago, human rights groups went to the Pentagon, to the National
Security Council; the president himself issued a statement in
which he indicated that this kind of behavior was utterly inappropriate
and, of course, it is seen to have continued long after that
statement was issued. And one of the reasons, I'm afraid, is
because those who undertake this kind of activity, whether they
be the prison guards themselves or military intelligence or higher-ups,
are able to get away with it."
A minute later, a caller -
identified as Steve from Minneapolis - made an insightful comment
on the air."I point out one other failing, in addition to
the other ones that Mr. Schulz has eloquently listed, and that's
the media," he said. "I mean, a year ago, you could
have been interviewing Mr. Schulz instead of today, and maybe
that would have prevented, you know, this recent scandal of torture."
While the Bush administration
did little but yawn about evidence of torture and other abuses
of Iraqi people at the hands of American occupiers, such disinterest
was largely replicated in the U.S. news media. "Ever since
the war began, Amnesty International has been receiving reports
of Iraqis who have been taken into detention by Coalition Forces
and whose rights have been violated," said an Amnesty International
press release dated March 18. "Some have been held without
charge for months. A number of detainees have been tortured and
ill-treated. Virtually none has had prompt access to a lawyer,
their family or judicial review of their detention."
A statement from an independent
credible source that some of the U.S. military's prisoners "have
been tortured" would seem to cry out for a quick response
in the form of journalistic exploration. But the statement conflicted
with thousands of news stories that - one way or another - portrayed
American troops as heroic and humane. It was easy for U.S. news
editors to ignore what Amnesty International had to say.
Investigative reporter Hersh,
who gained extensive access to official documents, writes that
the 372nd Military Police Company's "abuse of prisoners
seemed almost routine - a fact of Army life that the soldiers
felt no need to hide." Unlike the U.S. mainstream press,
some British daily newspapers have explored the racist aspects
of that abuse.
In the daily Independent, the
longtime Middle East correspondent Robert Fisk wrote that American
and British soldiers who were involved came from "towns
and cities where race hatred has a home." And he alluded
to the pernicious role of some mass media entertainment - "the
poisonous, racial dribble of a hundred Hollywood movies that
depict Arabs as dirty, lecherous, untrustworthy and violent people."
In the Arab world, the photographs
"have strengthened the feeling that there is a deep racism
underlying the occupiers' attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the
Third World generally," Ahdaf Soueif wrote in a Guardian
article that appeared on May 5. She contended that "the
acts in the photos being flashed across the networks would not
have taken place but for the profound racism that infects the
American and British establishments."
Soueif added: "There have
been reports of U.S. troops outside Fallujah talking of the fun
of being a sniper, of the different ways to kill people, of the
'rat's nest' that needs cleaning out. Some will say soldiers
will be soldiers. But that language has been used by neocons
at the heart of the U.S. administration; both Kenneth Adelman
and Paul Wolfowitz have spoken of 'snakes' and 'draining the
swamps' in the 'uncivilized parts of the world.' It is implicit
in the U.S. administration's position that anyone who does not
agree that all of history has been moving towards a glorious
pinnacle expressed in the U.S. political, ideological and economic
system has 'rejected modernity'; that it is America's mission
to civilize and to punish."
That's what Martin Luther King
Jr. was talking about when he said early in the spring of 1968:
"The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything
to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A
true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and
say of war: 'This way of settling differences is not just.'"
Norman Solomon is executive director of the Institute
for Public Accuracy in San Francisco. He is co-author of Target
Iraq: What the News Media Didn't Tell You. (Context Books,
2003).
Weekend
Edition Features for April 24 / 25, 2004
William
A. Cook
Tweedledee and Tweedledum: Kerry
and Bush Melt into One
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Stryking Out: a General, GM and the Army's Latest Tank
Brandy
Baker
A Revitalized Women's Movement? Let's Hope So
Robert
Fisk
A Warning to Those Who Dare Criticize Israel in the Land of Free
Speech
Ben
Tripp
October Surmise: a Case of Worst Scenarios
Nelson
Valdés
"Submit or Die": Iraq and the American Borg
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti's Return to the Future
Kurt
Nimmo
The CIA Killed Pat Tillman
Mark
Scaramella
Does Anybody Know Anything?
Patrick
Cockburn
The Return of Saddam's Generals
Gary
Engler
Welcome to La Paz: a Vacation in Tear Gas
Col.
Dan Smith
Whistling in the Dark: Israel, Palestine and Bush
Greg
Weiher
Iraq is Utterly Unlike Vietnam...
Elaine
Cassel
Life on the Outside: a Review
Vanessa
Jones
Letter from Australia: Why an Independent Won Sydney
Jim
French
Agriculture's Bullied Market
Hammond
Guthrie
Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and The Beatles
Poets'
Basement
Jones, Holt, Albert, LaMorticella
|