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New Edition of CounterPunch The Return of Robert Rubin: Kerry, Jobs and the Economy by Alexander Cockburn; Party Favors: the Political Business of Terry McAuliffe by Jeffrey St. Clair; The Kill Zone: Caring for the Wounded in Fallujah by David Martinez. In April, CounterPunch Online was read by 16.1 million viewers--by far our biggest month ever. But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Now Available: Hot New CounterPunch T-Shirts! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840 3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Cockburn / St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War Now Available! Today's Stories May 12, 2004 Bruce Jackson James Inhofe, the Dumbest Senator of Them All Christopher Brauchli Detention Camp, USA May 11, 2004 Mark Engler On the "Necessity" of Torture Ray McGovern More Troops? A March of Folly Kurt Nimmo Dirty Nukes and Jefferson's Grand Experiment Mickey Z. Less Than Hero Christopher Reed Torture on the Homefront: America's Long History of Prison Abuse Dennis Hans When John Negroponte was Mullah Omar Bruce Jackson Pete Seeger at 85 Mike Whitney Killing al Sadr Simon Helweg-Larsen Shrinking the Guatemalan Military William A. Cook The Unconscious Country: Righteous Indignation, Nakedly Displayed May 10, 2004 Robert Fisk From Hollywood to Abu Ghraib: Racism and Torture as Entertainment Wayne Madsen The Israeli Torture Template: Rape, Feces and Urine-Soaked Cloth Sacks Col. Dan Smith The Shame of Abu Ghraib Joe Bageant John Ashcroft, Keep Your Mouth Off My Wife! Ron Jacobs Rummy's Prisongate Blues: Don't Leave Mad; Just Leave Ben Tripp Getting in Touch with Your Inner Savage Ray Hanania Why They Hate Us: Racism, Bigotry and Abuse Reza Fiyouzat "Mishandled" Invasions Diane Christian Images & Abstractions & Genitals Website of the Day Crushing Iraqi Skulls with Tanks for Sport?   May 8 / 9, 2004 Cockburn / St. Clair Torture: as American as Apple Pie Adam Jones America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated and Shot at Kunduz? Douglas Valentine Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press Kurt Nimmo Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib Brian Cloughley Humpty Dumpty is Falling Lucia Dailey Forbidden Games Joanne Mariner * * * *: Redacting Moussaoui Mickey Z. Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders) John Chuckman The Thing with No Brain Doug Giebel Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs Norm Dixon How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11 Sam Bahour A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah Susan Davis Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art Dave Marsh In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing Laura Flanders Life with Dick and Lynne Dave Zirin Fans Push Spiderman Off Base Carolyn Baker Why I Won't Vote in 2004 Prince "Ain't No Sense in Voting" Dr. Susan Block Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation Poets' Basement Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska   May 7, 2004 Human Rights Watch 10 Prisons; 9,000 Prisoners: US Detention Facilities in Iraq Ron Jacobs UnAmerican? I Wish It Were So Robert Fisk An Illegal and Immoral War Ahmad Faruqui The 50th Anniversary of Dien Bien Phu Alexander Zaitchik From Terrell Unit in Texas to Abu Ghraib: Doesn't It Ring a (Prison) Bell? Mike Whitney The Price of Victory Norman Solomon This War, Racism and Media Denial M. Shahid Alam A Comic Apology   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.     Subscribe Online

May 12, 2004 Every Picture Tells a Story, Don't It? So, Who's to Blame? By VIRGINIA TILLEY Secretary Rumsfeld has apologized. Or rather, he read a statement full of apology, now dutifully quoted in the media. Nothing in the rest of his testimony or his bearing, however, indicated the slightest remorse. Instead, with his usual nasal petulance, he lashed out against any suggestion that he had neglected to take proper action, waving impatiently at the time-line of military investigations. He snapped insultingly that a three-line press release in January had "informed the whole world," so what more do you want? (His face went blank when one Senator returned quietly, "You didn't inform us.") He protested his incapacity to follow every little crisis, waving papers about "eight-thousand court-martials"--the only reliable statistic he bothered to bring. When did he inform the president? Well, come on. He had so many important things to discuss in those talks with the president, he could hardly be expected to remember when he had discussed the little matter of rampant torture in the US occupation's main prison. The real culprit, then, in his view? Digital cameras. For without them, the process would have ground on normally, through the months, and resolved itself somehow, while Iraqis lay naked and ridiculed on concrete floors. So who's to blame? The generals at his side were clearly implicated, but they did what guidelines told them to do. Rumsfeld might have been partly right about that; as the old saying goes, military justice is to justice what military music is to music. It was Rumsfeld himself who clearly failed to do his job: here, to watch over the politics of detention policy--one of the most crucial and sensitive dimensions of any occupation--by jumpstarting investigations when the first ICRC reports came in, or at least warning the president and the Congress about the pending scandal. He knew about it, but paid no attention. It was not important to him. He didn't read the Taguba report. He didn't ask about the photos. And it is precisely that casual neglect of suffering Iraqi citizens, through months of their systematic torture and detention without trial in US occupation prisons, which truly drives this crisis. Because it reflects something which has come to the fore more forcefully in Europe and the Middle East than it has here, and is the real burden the US must now overcome. The larger politics infusing the prison scandal can perhaps be glimpsed by considering a very different event, an extraordinary exhibit now touring the US: photographs of lynchings, mostly of black people in the early-twentieth century. The collection is soul-wracking in two ways. Dangling black bodies, battered and bleeding, terribly evoke past hours of terror and torture. But it is the white people standing around the tree, smiling into the camera--sometimes including women with parasols and fine frocks--who fascinate observers. For as curator said, it is "the comfort, the ease of the crowd" which conveys the dire context: that a whole white society shared a mindset in which this cluster of fine citizens could pose openly beside their murdered trophy and smile for a photograph. As the visitor peers into these tiny documents of racial terror, that very act of looking brings a final, gut-wrenching realization: for these photos were converted into postcards, mailed as mementos to family or friends. Such was the heart-stopping dehumanization of black people in the era. Those postcards should better illuminate our understanding of the politics now surrounding these photos from the Iraqi jails. It is not simply that people were stripped, or piled naked into a pyramid, or left shackled together on the corridor floor. The real shock has always been the guards grinning and clowning for the cameras--or even the casual guards just standing about, discussing other things, while prisoners lay naked in their midst--because it signaled that the prisoners' torment was entertaining, or otherwise of no moral consequence, because they were vaguely dehumanized. And unfortunately for US foreign policy, the crucial condition framing this debasement is that those prisoners were Iraqis--Arabs--being tormented by white Americans or Europeans. Appalled US critics speak of "sadistic abuse" and "brutality" and "humiliation," and these terms are correct. But even footage of Saddam's torturers beating Iraqi citizens does not convey the impression of essential degradation conveyed here, especially by Lynndie England's infamous leash. Yes, many Arab governments routinely torture, and get away with it. But they do not routinely reconceive their own people as subhuman, and something particularly awful surrounds that. Europeans recall "master race" doctrines; Arab societies recall colonial racial debasements. Either way, Americans are now anathema. Many in the US would hotly deny a pattern of racism against Iraqi Arabs, and they would be right to an extent. But racism does not always look like the same. Sometimes it comes out as paternalism: like dumping unmanageable authority for a wrecked country on the shattered Iraqi people under condescending slogans like "it's time for them to take some responsibility." For US policy in Iraq, it first showed as a reckless willingness to invade and occupy the country on false pretenses, risking an entire society on a geostrategic myth. But in the event, it has shown especially as criminal negligence. Real respect for Iraqi society would have required elaborate planning for the occupation, and indeed the US State Department and its genuine Middle East specialists worked for a year on such plans. Rumsfeld and his Pentagon Office of Special Plans threw out those plans like old trash and instead employed a "minimal force" doctrine which had no planning at all--and the Iraqi people's national infrastructure was looted down to the wiring. Casual disregard further showed in the occupation's neglect of Iraqis' most urgent basic need, health, by failing to give all priority to fully restoring Iraq's once-fine and now-wrecked hospitals. It still shows in the grossly inadequate troop complement, which has left Iraqi society struggling with rampant crime and the trauma of multiple insurgencies. Outright racism has especially reeked from Rumsfeld's disdainful dismissal of any hint that the US should keep count of Iraqi civilian casualties, as is required by the Geneva Conventions. In similar vein, impatient disdain has infused Rumsfeld's accusation that, because "insurgents" in Fallujah were "using women and children as shields," US forces were somehow legitimized in blowing those women and children away by the hundreds--numbers he and his cronies actually denounced the Arab media for trying to confirm. So who's to blame for the prison atrocities? Little Lynndie England, clutching her leash? Sadly, yes. But who gave her the leash? And who told her what to do with it? Racism is not the whole story, of course. Many Americans soldiers in this fatally flawed occupation genuinely see Iraqis as people like themselves and are trying their best to be helpful. Across the cultural barrier, human beings recognize each other, and some are losing their lives doing it. But not all soldiers can keep their moral compass in situations like this, as we learned to our lasting national grief in Vietnam. It is therefore not just some suspicious civilian contractors who inserted a grotesque dehumanization into Abu Ghraib--although a likely influence in that regard is peeking much speculation, for who else in the region sees Arabs as animals and has all these much-mentioned translation skills? But the whole hard-hearted Rumsfeld backdrop of the occupation is reflected in the casual body language of Abu Ghraib guards, as they stand chatting or smiling around naked Iraqis lying twisted on the concrete. For a message has filtered down from the top, the old paternalistic colonial message that so easily switches from generosity to brutal iron-fist repression: Iraqi Arabs aren't quite like us, are they? They are just a bit less. They need to be saved by us. But if they act up, bring them down fast. Because they don't really feel things the way we do, and it's so easy to humiliate an Arab. In any case, even if many Americans reject that message with anguish, it has now been broadcast all over the world in front-page photos from Abu Ghraib, thanks to Rumsfeld's casual neglect of these prisons and the welfare of the Iraqi people. It will require long hard work and a humility that our government is just discovering--starting with dismissal of the man ultimately responsible for perpetuating the torture--for our country to overcome it. Virginia Tilley is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, NY. She can be reached at: tilley@hws.edu Weekend Edition Features for May 8 / 9, 2004 Cockburn / St. Clair Torture: as American as Apple Pie Adam Jones America's Srebrenica: What About the Hundreds of POWs Suffocated and Shot at Kunduz? Douglas Valentine Who Let the Dogs Out?: Torture, the CIA and the Press Kurt Nimmo Rush Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib Brian Cloughley Humpty Dumpty is Falling Lucia Dailey Forbidden Games Joanne Mariner * * * *: Redacting Moussaoui Mickey Z. Please Forgive U.S.? (There Are No Innocent Bystanders) John Chuckman The Thing with No Brain Doug Giebel Someone Knew: There Were No WMDs Norm Dixon How the Bush Gang Exploited 9/11 Sam Bahour A Guiding Light Falls on Ramallah Susan Davis Disorderly Conduct as Fine Art Dave Marsh In a Pig's Eye: Alan Lomax, Dead But Still Stealing Laura Flanders Life with Dick and Lynne Dave Zirin Fans Push Spiderman Off Base Carolyn Baker Why I Won't Vote in 2004 Prince "Ain't No Sense in Voting" Dr. Susan Block Onan for Two: Liberating Masturbation Poets' Basement Smith, Sleeth, Ford, Albert and Saska WWW http://www.counterpunch.org   Keep CounterPunch Alive: Make a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online! home / subscribe / about us / books / archives / search / links /