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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.

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April 30, 2002

Christopher Reilly
Kissinger: the Wanted Man

April 29, 2002

Larry Hales
At the Church of the Nativity

Michael Colby
The Times Does Brockovich
Ralph Nader with Cleavage?

CounterPunch Wire
Bank Robs Publisher,
Vows to Repeat

Gavin Keeney
So Long, Frank O. Gehry?

April 28, 2002

Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine

April 27, 2002

Dr. Susan Block
Adelphia Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting

Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School Pyramid

Jeffrey St. Clair
Set This Flag on Fire!

April 26, 2002

Tom Turnipseed
Act Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man

Mokhiber / Weissman
Anti-Bribery Law Takes a Hit

Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim

April 25, 2002

Francis A. Boyle
Home Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US

Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake

Stanton and Madsen
US Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery

Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration

David Vest
Code Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican

Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range Thinking

Rep. Dennis Kucinich
Standing with the Peace Movement

April 24, 2002

David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu

Jean Fallow
A20 in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again

Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man: Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson

Tanya Reinhart
Jenin, the Propaganda Battle

Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American Responsibility

Alexander Cockburn
The Loneliest Road

Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel

Mokhiber / Weissman
A Big Blow to Big Tobacco

April 23, 2002

Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in Jenin?

John Chuckman
I, George:
Gomer as Claudius

Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen

Dr. Susan Block
Bernard Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief

Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?

April 22, 2002

CounterPunch Wire
EPA Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest

Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week

Ron Jacobs
A20 in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly

Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers

Irit Katriel
Word Games and Body Bags

Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace

Daniel Bar-Tal
Is There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding

David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town

Shaik Ubaid
Today I Was a Palestinian

April 21, 2002

Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel

Mike Leon
200,000 in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"

C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism

Kathy Kelly
Gimme Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin

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 15, 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 30, 2002

Apartheid in the Holy Land

by Desmond Tutu

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil. I have continued to feel strongly with the Jews. I am patron of a Holocaust centre in South Africa. I believe Israel has a right to secure borders.

What is not so understandable, not justified, is what it did to another people to guarantee its existence. I've been very deeply distressed in my visit to the Holy Land; it reminded me so much of what happened to us black people in South Africa. I have seen the humiliation of the Palestinians at checkpoints and roadblocks, suffering like us when young white police officers prevented us from moving about.

On one of my visits to the Holy Land I drove to a church with the Anglican bishop in Jerusalem. I could hear tears in his voice as he pointed to Jewish settlements. I thought of the desire of Israelis for security. But what of the Palestinians who have lost their land and homes?

I have experienced Palestinians pointing to what were their homes, now occupied by Jewish Israelis. I was walking with Canon Naim Ateek (the head of the Sabeel Ecumenical Centre) in Jerusalem. He pointed and said: "Our home was over there. We were driven out of our home; it is now occupied by Israeli Jews."

My heart aches. I say why are our memories so short. Have our Jewish sisters and brothers forgotten their humiliation? Have they forgotten the collective punishment, the home demolitions, in their own history so soon? Have they turned their backs on their profound and noble religious traditions? Have they forgotten that God cares deeply about the downtrodden?

Israel will never get true security and safety through oppressing another people. A true peace can ultimately be built only on justice. We condemn the violence of suicide bombers, and we condemn the corruption of young minds taught hatred; but we also condemn the violence of military incursions in the occupied lands, and the inhumanity that won't let ambulances reach the injured.

The military action of recent days, I predict with certainty, will not provide the security and peace Israelis want; it will only intensify the hatred.

Israel has three options: revert to the previous stalemated situation; exterminate all Palestinians; or - I hope - to strive for peace based on justice, based on withdrawal from all the occupied territories, and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state on those territories side by side with Israel, both with secure borders.

We in South Africa had a relatively peaceful transition. If our madness could end as it did, it must be possible to do the same everywhere else in the world. If peace could come to South Africa, surely it can come to the Holy Land?

My brother Naim Ateek has said what we used to say: "I am not pro- this people or that. I am pro-justice, pro-freedom. I am anti- injustice, anti-oppression."

But you know as well as I do that, somehow, the Israeli government is placed on a pedestal [in the US], and to criticise it is to be immediately dubbed anti-semitic, as if the Palestinians were not semitic. I am not even anti-white, despite the madness of that group. And how did it come about that Israel was collaborating with the apartheid government on security measures?

People are scared in this country [the US], to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful - very powerful. Well, so what? For goodness sake, this is God's world! We live in a moral universe. The apartheid government was very powerful, but today it no longer exists. Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Pinochet, Milosevic, and Idi Amin were all powerful, but in the end they bit the dust.

Injustice and oppression will never prevail. Those who are powerful have to remember the litmus test that God gives to the powerful: what is your treatment of the poor, the hungry, the voiceless? And on the basis of that, God passes judgment.

We should put out a clarion call to the government of the people of Israel, to the Palestinian people and say: peace is possible, peace based on justice is possible. We will do all we can to assist you to achieve this peace, because it is God's dream, and you will be able to live amicably together as sisters and brothers.

Desmond Tutu is the former Archbishop of Cape Town and chairman of South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission. This address was given at a conference on Ending the Occupation held in Boston, Massachusetts, earlier this month.