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Read Cockburn and St. Clair's Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press and discover how the CIA gave a helping hand to the opium lords who took over Afghanistan, thus ushering the Taliban into power.


CounterPunch: Complete Coverage of 9/11 and the War on Afghanistan

New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: Occupied Ramallah Close Up: Large and Small Change in a State of Siege; Feed Your Goats, Maybe Get Shot; Snipers on Main Street; Hiding in Your Back Room for Three Days; Humor, Heroism and Bravado Amid Bullets; Occupied DC: Legislators' Daily Gauntlet of Searches; Only in America: His Dad Was CIA; He Hated Blacks; He Robbed Banks, and Liked to Dress Up Like a Woman; A Tribute to Billy Wilder. Remember, the CounterPunch website is supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

April 4, 2002

M. Shahid Alam
The Lies of Thomas Friedman

April 3, 2002

Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks

Bernard Weiner
An American Jew Talks
About His Shame

David Vest
Sting of Stings

Tzaporah Ryter
Under Fire: an American Student in Ramallah

Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest

John Chuckman
Of War, Islam and Israel

Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem

Alexander Cockburn
The Sins of the Church

April 2, 2002

Uri Avnery
Murdering Arafat?

Jeff Chang
Is Protest Music Dead?

Lev Grinberg
Israel's State Terrorism

Norman Madarasz
Bullying Brazil

Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah

Steve Perry
Let's Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer

April 1, 2002

Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich
Peace and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action

Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out

Molly Secours
Tennessee's Kangaroo Court

Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street

Dave Marsh
DeskScan: This Week's
Top 10 CDs

Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law

March 31, 2002

Jordan Flaherty
Last Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me

Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem

Maha Sbitani
The Israeli Army Took Over My House

Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War

March 24/30, 2002

Alexander Cockburn
The Year of the Yellow Notepad:
Plagiarism and History

Rep. Ron Paul
Slavery and the Draft

Fidel Castro
A Better World is Possible

Edward Said
What Price Oslo?

José Saramago
Justice and Democracy Denied

Azmi Bishara
Talking to Tanks

Jeffrey St. Clair
Clearcutting Montana

Alexander Cockburn
50 Years of James Bond

Wilhelm Reich
Gethsemane

Claud Cockburn
The Horror of It All

Dave Marsh
What's Playing at My Houe

David Vest
Remembering Tammy Wynette

Jeffrey St. Clair
Waylon Jennings:
an Honest Outlaw

March 23, 2002

Mokhiber/Weissman
A Corporate Lawyer
Speaks Out

Saeed Vaseghi
The US and Iran's Quest
for Democracy

Brian J. Foley
Does Pedophilia Scandal Spell an Opportunity for Catholics?

Sheperd Bliss
American Soul and Empire

James Packard Winkler
Occupation and Terror:
Politics from a Gun Barrel

M. Shahid Alam
A New International Division
of Labor

T.W. Croft
Enron's Attack on Our
Economic Security

March 22, 2002

Robert Jensen
Corporate Power is a
Threat to Democracy

Tommy Ates
The Future of Black Academia

Rep. Ron Paul
Why are We in Ukraine?

March 21, 2002

McQuinn, Munson, & Wheeler
Stars and Stripes:
Killing for the Flag?

John Chuckman
How Change is Wrought

David Vest
Hail to the Chaff

March 20, 2002

Kay Lee
Censorship at Angelfire

Robert Jensen
The Politics of Pain
and Pleasure

Sheperd Bliss
Notes from Hawai'i:
Trouble in Paradise

Rick Giambetti
Prozac and Suicide:
an Interview with
Dr. David Healy

Philip Farruggio
Bullies

Lori Allen
Live from Ramallah:
The Madness of Occupation

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

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Published March 1, 2002

  • Facing Down Rehnquist and Scalia:
  • Jennifer Harbury at the Supreme Court;
  • ADL Throws in Towel, Pays Up:
  • How They Worked for Apartheid Regime and Spied on NAACP:
  • Cockburn on America the Bully:
  • From Teddy Roosevelt to George W.
  • St. Clair on Musicians Against the Death Penalty & The Legacy of the Mekons.


    Search CounterPunch

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 New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism

By Rahul Mahajan

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


Private Warriors
by Ken Silverstein

CounterPunch's Booktalk

April 4, 2002

Stop the Killing Now!

By Tom Turnipseed

It is time to declare a cease-fire and end the killing in the Middle East. The martial madness is lurching out-of-control and threatens to involve more countries and more innocent people. Jerusalem is a holy city of the great prophets of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam and it is once again being torn apart by an endless, mindless cycle of vengeful killing that has continued in the area for 4,000 years. Millions of people have been died and these three religious faiths have been used as reasons to kill.

The great medieval Crusades of the Christians slaughtered Jews as they marched across Europe down to the Holy Land to kill Arabs and drive them from Jerusalem. The interminable bloody conflict over Palestine and Jerusalem between Jewish Israelis and Islamic Arabs continues the senseless slaughter and madness of mortal combat. Judaism, Christianity and Islam all descend from Abraham, and their principal prophets preached peace, justice and love. The United States should convene a peace conference in Jerusalem.

President George W. Bush must take a bold and imaginative step for peace in spite of the corporate interests who appear to control his administration. As a person who professes his love of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, Mr. Bush must stand up to the weapons, energy, media and entertainment industries who profit most from war and violence. Only three days after the disastrous attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, I made a similar request of Mr. Bush to go Jerusalem and make peace rather than make war in an essay entitled "An Eye for An Eye". It was published in various papers and on web-sites and I addressed the war profit motives of corporate interests.

On September 14, 2001, I wrote, "Billions of U.S. tax dollars supply the sophisticated weaponry of the Israelis and the armed forces of Arab nations like Saudi Arabia and Egypt while the U. S. defense industry makes big profits. The U.S. dominated energy cartel uses Middle-Eastern conflict as an excuse to charge exorbitant prices to an energy dependent world and increase their revenues. If the U.S. declares war and attacks oil-producing Arabic countries in retaliation for the "Attack on America," the weapons industry will rake in even more profits, the energy industry will have an excuse to charge more for their products and the big media conglomerate's ratings and profits will soar over the coverage of the violence and carnage of war."

We have not yet directly attacked an oil-producing Arabic country like Iraq, but the Bush administration has been furiously beating the war drums to do so. Our failure to make necessary peace initiatives in the escalating conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians has rallied every member of the Arab League to oppose our proposed war against Iraq. The Arab nations want the United States to give its full support to the Saudi-proposed peace plan that establishes a separate Palestinian state. The Arab states also expressed their resentment of the United States and Israel calling Arab suicide bombers "terrorists" instead of referring to them as "martyrs". The escalating war in the Middle-East has furnished an excuse to raise the price of oil, benefitting U.S. oil companies along with oil-producing nations. The war against Afghanistan also has big oil implications.

The war against Afghanistan has enabled the Bush administration to install an interim government in Afghanistan headed by Hamid Karzai, a former consultant for the UNOCAL oil company. Another UNOCAL oil consultant, Zalmay Khalizad, was nominated by Bush as a special envoy to the Afghan government. UNOCAL and the U.S. government worked for several years prior to September 11, 2001 to secure a deal with the Afghan government to construct a major pipeline from the petroleum-rich Caspian sea basin through Afghanistan. Leaders of the Taliban government were brought to Houston, Texas in 1997 as part of that effort. Coincidentally, the Afghan war-inspired coalition with the previously "unfriendly" regime in Pakistan also helps insure that the pipeline can be built on down through Pakistan to the Arabian Sea.

With all the talk of never-ending-war against terrorism and the mythical "axis of evil," the makers of killing tools in the U.S. weapons industry are set to make even more enormous profits.

Dan Rather is now coming to us live from Jerusalem as the media moves more of its war coverage to the Middle-East. Recent reports from Jerusalem, Ramallah and Bethlehem showed Israeli soldiers firing in the direction of non-violent peace protestors from Europe and the United States, a Boston Globe reporter shot and wounded by Israeli soldiers, and frightened families among the some 10,000 U.S. citizens of Palestinian ancestry living in the Ramallah area north of Jerusalem. U.S. reporters told of being forced to leave the area by Israeli soldiers at gunpoint and big Israeli tanks rumbling through the town of Bethlehem, reeking destruction.

The United States is on the sidelines in peace efforts as weapons supplied by U.S. taxpayers are used in an all out war against many innocent Palestinians. The war is to avenge the acts of those the Israelis and the United States calls "terrorists" but the Arabs call "martyrs".

Retributive killing has always been the human species ultimate evil-doing, causing human suffering that far surpasses the misery inflicted on us by disease, pestilence, and so-called "natural causes." Murder is the greatest taboo in all cultures, but state sanctioned killing for revenge is hyped as a "just war" by the talking heads on the evening news and is approved by most U.S. politicians. War sells. The mass murder of war is romanticized and glamorized by war profiteering corporate interests, from the weapons industry to the violence-peddling entertainment and media industry.

I wrote last September, ".. why doesn't President Bush convene a peace conference in Jerusalem with all the leaders of the nations and religions involved. He could declare the biblical "New Jerusalem" and gather at the Temple Mount with these powerful leaders who always seem to call on the poor people to fight and die in the madness of mortal combat. We need to work harder than ever before for peace. We must convince our fellow human beings that there is no difference among people anywhere worth killing one more person over."

Tom Turnipseed is an attorney, writer and civil rights activist in Columbia, South Carolina. http://www.turnipseed.net