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Today's Stories
February
18 / 19, 2006
Werther
A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11
They Don't Want You to Ask
February
17, 2006
Floyd
Rudmin
Secret War Plans and the Malady of
American Militarism
Gervasio
Rodríguez
FBI Home Invasions in Puerto Rico
Gary
Leupp
The Mad is No Longer Out of the Question:
Stopping the War on Iran Before It Starts
Ramzy
Baroud
Weathering the Globalization Storm
Amira
Hass
Apartheid Gates: IDF Establishes "Israeli Only" Crossings
Matthew
Koehler
Forest Abuse on the Kootenai: an Intervention in Montana
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
Deadeye Dick: Who Dares Call Him Chickenhawk Now?
Debbie
Nathan
ABC's Primetime "Teen Sex Slaves" Scam
Website
of the Day
Black Mesa Defense
Febrauary
16, 2006
Lila
Rajiva
Torture Pictures That Didn't Make
the Exhibition
Norman
Solomon
Dick Cheney's Fox Trot
Ron
Jacobs
An Interview with Antiwar Faster Mike
Ferner
Paul
Craig Roberts
Their Own Economic Reality
Website
of the Day
This
Ain't No Video Game
February
15, 2006
Brian
Conacnnon, Jr.
Haiti's Elections: Chaos, Supression
and Fraud
Dave
Lindorff
Democrats Shoot Their Own, Too
Saree
Makdisi
Israeli Ultimatums
Joshua
Frank
The Rhetorical Gore
Amira
Hass
Down the Expulsion Highway
CounterPunch
Wire
Winter of Discontent: a 34-Day Fast
Against the War
Robert
Bryce
The United States of Enron
Website
of the Day
Osama's
Game: an Interview with Michael Scheuer
February
14, 2006
John
Sugg
Those Cartoons and the Neo Con: Daniel
Pipes and the Danish Editor
Don
Santina
DiFi and the Royal Democrats: the
Curious Withdrawal of Cindy Sheehan
William
A. Cook
Shaming Sharon
Ray
McGovern
Who Will Blow the Whistle About
Iran?
John
Ross
Bush's Mexican Poodle
Website
of the Day
Willie
Nelson Records CPer Ned Sublette's "Cowboys Are Frequently
Secretly"
February 13, 2006
Lila
Rajiva
Axis of Child Abusers: UK Troops
Beat Up Barefoot Iraqi Teens
Christopher
Brauchli
Whistleblowers and Witch Hunters:
the Bush Inquisition
Dave
Lindorff
Deadeye Dick: If Stupidity Were
Impeachable, Cheney Would Be History
Ron
Jacobs
Black Liberation
Mike
Whitney
Riding High with Hugo Chavez
Michael
Neumann
Respectful Cultures and Disrespectful
Cartoons
Website
of the Day
Virtual Resistance
February
11 / 12, 2006
Alexander
Cockburn
How Not to Spot a Terrorist
Ralph
Nader
Bringing
Democracy to the Federal Reserve
Paul Craig
Roberts
Nuking
the Economy
Pat Williams
John
Boehner's Dirty Little Secret: Flying Lobbyist Air at $4,000
a Junket
Fred Gardner
Dr.
Mikuriya's Appeal: a Last Minute Twist
Saul Landau
From
Munich to Hamas
John Chuckman
Cartoons
and Bombs: Was Rice Right for Once?
Roger Burbach
Evo
Morales: the Early Days
Seth Sandronsky
Economy
on Ice
Website of
the Weekend
Just
Say Know
February 10,
2006
Carl
G. Estabrook
A US War Plan for Khuzestan?
Sen.
Russell Feingold
A Raw Deal on the Patriot Act
Roxanne
Dunbar----Ortiz
How Did Evo Morales Come to Power?
Saree Makdisi
The
Tempest Over the Hamas Charter
Website of
the Day
The
New York Art Scene: 1974----1984
February 9,
2006
Dave Lindorff
Bush
and Yamashita: War Crimes and Commanders-in-Chief
Mike Marqusee
The
Human Majority was Right About Iraq
Paul Craig Roberts
How Conservatives Went Crazy: the Rightwing Press
Peter Phillips
Inside
the Global Dominance Group: 200 Insiders Against the World
William S. Lind
Rumsfeld the Maximalist: the Long War
Christine Tomlinson Innocent
Targets in the "Long War": False Positives and Bush's
Eavesdropping Program
Will Youmans
Church of England Votes to Divest from Israel
Robert Robideau
An American Indian's View of the Cartoons
Richard Neville
The Cartoons That Shook the World: All This from the Danes, the
Least Funny People on Earth
Peter Rost
The New Robber Barons
Website of the Day
Eyes Wide Open
February 8,
2006
Ron Jacobs
The
Once and Future Sly Stone: Soundtrack to a Riot
Stan Cox
Making
and Unmaking History with General Myers
Sen. Russ Feingold
Why
Bush's Wiretapping Program is Illegal and Unconstitutional
Robert Jensen
Horowitz's
Academic Hit List: Take a Class from One of the CounterPunch
16
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Bush Should Have Wiretapped FEMA and Chertoff
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Alberto Gonzales Channels Mark Twain
Don Monkerud
Covenant Marriage on the Rocks
David Swanson
Inequality and War
C.L. Cook
Nuking Ontario
Christopher
Fons
Chill Out Jihadis: They're Just Cartoons!
Jeffrey Ballinger
The Other Side of Nike and Social Responsibility
Website of
the Day
Encyclopedia of Terrorism in the Americas
February 7,
2006
Edward Lucie-Smith
An
Urgent Plea to Save a Small Estonian Museum from Neo-Nazis
Robert Fisk
The Fury: Now Lebanon is Burning
Paul Craig Roberts
Colin Powell's Career as a "Yes Man"
Neve Gordon
Why Hamas Won
Joshua Frank
The Hillary and George Show: Partners in War
Peter Montague
The Problem with Mercury: a History of Regulatory Capitulation
Jackie Corr
The
Last Best Choice: Public Power and Montana
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Rumsfeld's
Enforcer: the Secret World of Stephen Cambone
Website of the Day
Negroes with Guns
February 6,
2006
Christopher
Brauchli
Spilling
Blood: Two Sentences
Robert Fisk
Don't
Be Fooled: This Isn't About Islam vs. Secularism
John Chuckman
What Did Stephen Harper Actually Win?
Jenna Orkin
Judge Slams EPA for Lying About 9/11's Toxic Air
Paul Craig
Roberts
Who
Will Save America: My Epiphany
February 4
/ 5, 2006
Alexander Cockburn
"Lights
Out in Tehran": McCain Starts Bombing Run
Mike Ferner
Pentagon
Database Leaves No Kid Alone
James Petras
Evo Morales's Cabinet: a Bizarre Beginning in Bolivia
Alan Maass
Scare of the Union: Dems Collaborate with Bush on Surveillance
Fred Gardner
Annals of Law Enforcement: a Look Inside the San Francisco DA's
Office
Ralph Nader
Bush's
Energy Escapades
Bill Glahn
RIAA Watch: Speaking in Tongues
Saul Landau
Freedom 2006: Buying Sex on the Net or Those Older Freedoms?
Laura Carlsen
Bad Blood on the Border: Killing Guillermo Martinez
James Brooks
Our Little Shop of Diplomatic Horrors
Mike Roselle
Hippies and Revolutionaries in Carcacas
John Holt
Black Gold, Black Death: Canada's Oil Sands Frenzy
Sarah Ferguson
Cops Suing Cops ... for Spying on Cops
William S.
Lind
Beware the Ides of March
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Price of Globalization: Free Trade or Free Speech?
Seth Sandronsky
The Color of Job Cuts in the Auto Industry
Derrick O'Keefe
Rumsfeld's Hitler Analogy
Michael Donnelly
Hop on the Bus
Ron Jacobs
Religion and Political Power
Elisa Salasin
RSVP to Bush
St. Clair / Vest
Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week
Stew Albert
God's Curse: Selected Poems
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, LaMorticella and Engel
Website of
the Weekend
Killer
Tells All!
February 3,
2006
Toufic Haddad
A
Parliament of Prisoners
Heather Gray
Working with Coretta Scott King
Tim Wise
Racism,
Neo-Confederacy and the Raising of Historical Illiterates
Conn Hallinan
Nuclear Proliferation: the Gathering Storm
Eva Golinger
Rumsfeld and Negroponte Amp Up Hositility Toward Venezuela
Daniel Ellsberg
The World Can't Wait: Invitation to a Demonstration
Dave Zirin
Detroit: Super Bowl City on the Brink
Robert Bryce
The
Problem with Cutting US Oil Imports from the Middle East
Website of
the Day
The Chavez Code
February 2,
2006
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Pentagon
Pork: How to Eliminate It
Stan Cox
Outsourcing
the Golden Years
Rachard Itani
Danes
(Finally) Apologize to Muslims (For the Wrong Reasons)
Mike Whitney
Afghanistan Five Years Later: Buildings Down, Heroin Up
Amira Hass
In
the Footsteps of Arafat: an Interview with Hamas' Ismail Haniya
Norman Solomon
When Praise is Desecration: Smothering King's Legacy with Kind
Words
Michael Simmons
Stew Lives!
Christopher
Reed
Japan's
Dirty Secret: One Million Korean Slaves
Website of the Day
State of Nature
February 1,
2006
Sharon Smith
The
Bluff and Bluster Dems: Alito and the Faux Filibuster
Jason Leopold
Enron and the Bush Administration
Cindy Sheehan
Getting
Busted at the State of the Union: What Really Happened
Joseph Grosso
Oprah
and Elie Wiesel: a Match Made in "Neutrality"
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Coretta Scott King was More Than Just Dr. King's Wife
Steven Higgs
Life After Roe. v. Wade
Robert Robideau
"God Given Rights": Palestine and Native America
R. Siddharth
Tales of Power: When Gandhi Rejected a Faustian Bargain with
Henry Ford
Jim Retherford
Remembering Stew Albert: the Quiet Genius
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
The Legacy of Coretta Scott King
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
True State of the Union
Website of
the Day
Candide's Notebooks
January 31,
2006
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Revolutionary
for the Hell of It: the Good Life of Stew Albert
Clancy Chassay
US
Prods Lebanon Towards Civil War
Dave Lindorff
The Democrats' Alito Debacle
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Alito: Harry-Kerry in the Senate
Oren Ben-Dor
Hamas' Victory: a New Hope?
Winslow Wheeler
Pentagon
Pork: What is It? Who Cooks It Up?
John Ryan
Canada: a Chilling Echo of Bush's Republicans
Mike Marqusee
Privatizing
Health Care: the Poor Pay the Price
Ron Jacobs
For Stew
Andrew Cockburn
Why Bush Probably Won't Attack Iran
Website of
the Day
Celebrating Stew Albert
January 30,
2006
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush,
Fox News and the Coming War on Iran
Winslow Wheeler
Inside
the Pork Shop: the Defense Budget and Congressional Earmarks
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Development Interrupted
Marcus Dam
"The Real Threat is from Imperial Fundamentalism":
an Interview with Tariq Ali
John Bomar
Message to Democrats: the Case Against Pre-War Lying is a Slam
Dunk, Stupid
Ben Beachy
Swindling the Sick: the IMF Debt Relief Sham
Gideon Levy
The Good News About Hamas' Victory
Michael Carmichael
Alito and Opus Dei
Missy Comley
Beattie
Of Losses and Lies
Norman Solomon
The Question Journalists Refuse to Ask Bush
Brian Concannon,
Jr.
Finally Some Good News From Haiti
Michael Ratner
Tomorrow is Today; the Time for
Resistance is Now
Website of
the Day
"I'm So Bored with Capitol Hill"
January 28
/ 29, 2006
Alexander Cockburn
Nicholas
Kristof's Brothel Problem
Ralph Nader
The Impeachable Mr. Bush
Col. Dan Smith
Spying and Lying by the Pentagon
Paul Craig Roberts
Blind Ignorance: Polls Show Many Americans Simply Dumber Than
Bush
Tammara Rosenleaf
Homefront War Diary: On Monday, My Husband Didn't Call
Ron Jacobs
Google This!
Harry Browne
Irish "Peace" Process at Recriminations Stage
Fred Gardner
Grover Norquist, Drug Policy Reformer?
Christopher
Reed
North Korean Forgeries
Bernard Chazelle
France's Colonial Blowback
Daniel Wolff
Radioactive Money, 2005: How Entergy Gets Its Way at Indian Point
Tom Kerr
Small Fry: If You're Not in Power, You'd Better Not Lie
Asad Abu Khalil
The Demise of Fatah
Chris Murphy
The Medicare Disaster
Dr. Susan Block
America Wants a Divorce
Kathy Deacon
Hippocratic Oaf
St. Clair /
Walker / Palmer / Shields
Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Laymon, Engel, Holt, Davies and Buknatski
Website of
the Weekend
Your Child Can Be a NSA Spook!
January 27, 2006
Suren Pillay
Making
the World Safe for Nuclear Violence, Again
Lawrence R.
Velvel
The
NYT and Alito: Journalistic Schizophrenia
J.L. Chestnut,
Jr
The
Cold Hard Truth: Marching Backwards on Civil Rights
Uri Avnery
To
Talk with Hamas
Gary Leupp
Hamas's Victory: "the Power of Democracy"
Samar Assad
A New Political Landscape in Palestine
Jeffrey St.
Clair
King
of the Hill: Sen. Ted Steven's Empire of Corruption
Website of the Day
Bush Jobs Program: You Too Can Be an FBI Snitch
January 26,
2006
Robert Robideau
An
AIM Activist's View of Jack Abramoff: Another Racist Out to Defraud
Native Tribes
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bolton
Orders Syria to Do the Impossible
Gilad Atzmon
Hamas'
Victory
Jason Leopold
A Vaster Conspiracy?: Fitzgerald Probes Niger Forgeries
Joshua Frank
Iran, Nukes and Oil
Dave Lindorff
Bush Calls Hamas Kettle Black
Susan Lee
An Open Letter to the State Dept. on the Cuban Five
Missy Comley Beattie
A Plea to the Marines: Stop Sending Recruiting Letters to Our
House!
Michael Carmichael
Extraordinary Alito
Michael Neumann
The
Core of Zionism
Website of
the Day
Who Will Stop the Slaughter of Yellowstone's Bison?
January 25,
2006
Saul Landau
Domestic
Spying, Now and Then: When Hoover Bugged Phone Calls with My
Father
James Petras
Is Chile's Bachelet Washington's Best New Ally?
Lawrence R.
Velvel
Alito
and Roberts' Self-Gag Rule is a Phony
Vijay Prashad
From Chennai with Love
Kevin Zeese
Gen. William Odom Supports the Empire, But Opposes the War
Alison Weir
When a Mother Gets Killed Does She Make a Sound? Anatomy of a
Cover-Up
Bruce K. Gagnon
Bush War Economy: Exporting Jobs and Security
Joan Roelofs
Military
Contractor Philanthropy
Website of
the Day
Bob Marley Does Dylan
January 24,
2006
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
Patriot Police: the Unfathomed Dangers of Patriot Act Reauthorization
Kathy Kelly
Liberation
and Deliverance
Jorge Mariscal
Bush's War Viewed from the South
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Smoke
and Mirrors in the Defense Budget
John Walsh
Why We Picket John Kerry: Join Us Friday in Boston
Youmans / Muaddi
The Growing Israel Divestment Movement
Roger Burbach
Bolivia's Evo Morales: Original Mandate for Social Revolution
Fr. Gerard
Jean-Juste
Letter from a Haitian Prison
Noam Chomsky
The Terrorist in the Mirror
Website of
the Day
Big Brother Watch
January 23, 2006
Uri Avnery
Pity
the Orphan: Israel, Hamas and the Palestinian Elections
Susan Pynchon
Diebold in Florida: "I Saw It Hacked"
William Loren
Katz
Harry Belafonte Reaffirms a Proud Tradition
Christopher Brauchli
Bush's IRS: Squeezing the Poor
Chris Floyd
The Goon Show
Joshua Frank
Tre Arrow and ELF: Environmentalism on Death Row
Norman Solomon
The Other Shoe Drops: Classified Leaks and Journalists
Jackie Corr
Working for the Railroad: Racicot and the Burlington Northern
Paul Craig
Roberts
Inside
Cheney's War Workshop
Website of the Day
Arms Against War
January 21/22,
2006
Tim Shorrock
Why
the Buses Didn't Come: Bush-Linked Florida Company and the Katrina
Evacuation Fiasco
Ralph Nader
Congressional
Ethics After Abramoff
Peter Feng
Casualties of War: Neoliberalism, Katrina and the Asian Tsunami
Brian Cloughley
CIA Bombs Pakistan, Hits America
Michael Donnelly
Tapes and Snitches: Feds Hand Down Eco-Sabotage Indictments
Tom Kerr
Crackdown in San Quentin: Why are They Rounding Up Tookie Williams'
Friends?
Tim Matson
Best Not Drive While Black on I-91
(But Walk Tall With the Bloody Chainsaw You Just Topped Your
Neighbor With)
Dave Lindorff
Rumsfeld: Venezuela "Overspending" on Military
Daniel Wolff
Hour of Reckoning: the Gospel Roots of Wilson Pickett
Fred Gardner
"Metabolic Syndrome" is to "Clinical Depression"
as Acomplia is Prozac
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Used the NSA to Spy on Americans Prior to 9/11
Matthew Koehler
Betting on Biscuit: Does Post-Fire Logging Make Ecological (or
Economic) Sense?
John Bomar
The Emperor's Clothes: from Bonaparte to Bush
Ron Jacobs
When Miners March: Struggle and Lose, Struggle and Win!
Becky Akers
Debunking Democracy
Joanne Mariner
Security, Terrorism and Human Rights
St. Clair / Walker / Pollack
CounterPunch Playlists: What We're Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Albert, Holt, Engel and Davies
Website of the Day
Osama's Book Club: Featured Selection
January 20, 2006
Brian J. Foley
What
Kind of War Doesn't Allow for a Truce?
Richard Gott
Revolution in the Andes
Joshua Frank
Israel and US Threats Against Iran
Pierre Tristam
Imperial Mongers: From Gladstone to "King George"
Bernstein /
Allegretto
Hourly Wages Have Fallen in 18 of the Last 20 Months
Elizabeth Schulte
Abortion
Before Roe
Website of
the Day
This Dog Bites
January 19,
2006
Paul Craig
Roberts
Political
Machines: Was the 2004 Election Stolen?
Bill Simpich
Those Damn Democrats: To End War, Don't Ask for What You Don't
Want
Kevin Alexander
Gray
Reclaiming King Day (From the NAACP)
Sam Husseini
Rot at the Top: If the Democrats Really Want to Stop Bush, They
Need New Leadership
Sam Smith
The Real Chocolate City
Monica Benderman
Dare to Make a Stand
Winslow T.
Wheeler
Just
How Big is the Defense Budget?
Website of the Day
Leave My Child Alone
January 18,
2006
Paul Craig
Roberts
Gore's
Speech: a Challenge That Cannot be Ignored
Norman Solomon
The Crime of Giving the Orders: Executing Clarence Ray Allen
Jonathan M.
Feldman
The System Doesn't Work Anymore
Michael Carmichael
"Extraordinary Circumstances": the Case Against Alito
Paul D'Amato
The Crimes of Jimmy Carter
Cynthia McKinney
King's Mission Endures
Norman Finkelstein
Why
an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified
Website of the Day
The Planetary Movement
January 17,
2006
M. Shahid Alam
"Real
Men Go to Tehran": Has al-Qaeda's Gambit Paid Off?
John Ross
Latin
America's Indians on the Move--in Different Directions
Tariq Ali
God, Blood, Oil and Iraq
Michael Donnelly
Killing Anna Mae Aquash, Smearing John Trudell
Amira Hass
No Child Left Unharassed: the Obstacle Course to School in Palestine
Doug Giebel
Alito's CAP: Either He Lied on His Resumé or There's a
Cover-Up
Bill Quigley
MLK Day in a Haitian Prison
Ron Jacobs
Meet the Son of Jim Crow: MLK Day Below the Mason/Dixon Line
Mike Stark
Governor on a Killling Spree
Werther
The Liberties of the Subject
January 16, 2006
John Walsh
Tears
of a Neocon: The Good News from Daniel Pipes
Earl Ofari
Hutchinson
Black
Students Under Fire: Racial Profiling in Public Schools
Roger Burbach
Bachelet's
Victory: Leftward Drift in Chile?
Norman Solomon
Ted Koppel, NPR and Henry Kissinger: a Natural Fit?
Robert Jensen
Dreams and Nightmares: How Would King Judge America?
Sam Husseini
Martin Luther King and the Deeper Malady
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush
Crosses the Rubicon
Website of the Day
MLK: Beyond Vietnam
January 14
/ 15, 2006
Alexander Cockburn
What
the FBI Repairman Wore When He Tried to Bug Edward Said
JoAnn Wypijewski
What
is an Antiwar Movement?
James Petras
The State of the Empire, 2006
Ron Jacobs
Fifteen Years of War: Who's Better Off?
Brian Cloughley
Fly Boys and Lie Boys: Smart-Bombing Iraqi Families While They
Sleep
Marianne McDonald
The Madness of Ajax: a Play for Our Time
Bruce Tyler Wick
Bush on Torture Echoes Charles I on Arbitrary Imprisonment
Fred Gardner
A Last, Desperate Plea to Stay in Canada
Flavia Alaya
Victory at Passaic County Jail
Gary Leupp
A Neocon Plan to Plant WMDs?
Dr. Susan Block
Peeping Tom in the Bush: Nonconsenual Voyeurism and the NSA
Nicole Colson
The House Jack Built: The Abramoff Giude to Buying Friends and
Influencing Politics
Jeffrey Kolakowski
Senator as Illusionist: the Hypocrisies of John McCain
Missy Comley
Beattie
The Stepford Hearings of Samuel Alito: The Senator, the Weepy
Wife and a Secret Annoiting
Charles Thomson
Is Serota Dead in the Water?: the Ofili Scandal at the Tate
St. Clair /
Walker / Vest
Playlsts: What We're Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Albert, Engel, Ford and Davies
Website of
the Weekend
Historians Against the War
January 13,
2006
Ralph Nader
The
Two Questions the Senate Should Have Asked Alito
Leonard Weinglass
The
Singular Story of the Cuban Five
Amira Hass
Prisoners in Their Own Land: 800,000 Palestinians Sealed Off
by IDF in West Bank
Chris Kutalik
/ Jennifer Biddle
Airline Workers Fight Back
Lawrence R. Velvel
Alito and the Democrats
Dave Lindorff
Eight Who Dared: a (Short) Congressional Honor Roll
Mike Whitney
Countdown to War with Iran?
David Price
How
the FBI Spied on Edward Said
January 12,
2006
Jennifer Van
Bergen
The
Unitary Executive: Why the Bush Doctrine Violates the Constitution
Jeremy Brecher / Brendan Smith
Command Responsibility: Torture and Legal Accountability
Lawrence R.
Velvel
Alito
Refuses to Answer Fundamental Questions
Ralph Nader / Robert Weissman
Corporations, Originalism and the Bill of Rights: an Open Letter
to Justice Scalia
Jackie Corr
Killing the Big Sky's Golden Goose: Marc Racicot and the Deregulation
of Montana Power
Jared Bernstein
The Wage Doldrums
Russell D.
Hoffman
New Horizons in Space, New Lows in Government
Aubrey Streit
I Was Born in a Small Town: the Fate of Rural America
Clancy Sigal
Hugh
Thompson and My Lai: He Broke Ranks; He Did the Right Thing
Website of the Day
Nukes in Space
January 11,
2006
Kevin Zeese
NSA
Spied on Baltimore Peace Group (And They've Got the Documents
That Prove It)
Ray McGovern
The
Big Wiretap
Allan Maass
/ Joe Allen
Schwarzenegger's
Hit List: Smearing Mandela, Killing Tookie
Earl Ofari
Hutchinson
Snatching at King's Legacy: Mythmaking, Profiteering & Outright
Distortions
Annie Murphy
Evo Morales' Sweater
Allan Lichtman
Abramoff's
Kind of Big Government
Ramzy Baroud
Politics of Chaos: Gaza's Turmoil in Context
Joshua Frank
MoveOn Surrenders to Hillary
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
"Eating
Palestine for Breakfast": the Real Sharon
Website of
the Day
Memoirs of Rummy's Geisha
January 10,
2006
Uri Avnery
The
Post-Sharon Landscape: Three Fingers, No Fist
Saul Landau
Different
Americas
Noam Chomsky
Beyond the Ballot: Iraq, Iran and China
Brian J. Foley
Playing with Fire: Congress and Executive Power
Lenni Brenner
The War Within the Antiwar Movement
Ronan Sheehan
Sheehan to Sheehan: Cindy Sheehan's Irish Interview
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
Con Jobs
January 9,
2006
Behzad Yaghmaian
Who
is to Blame for the Deaths of the Sudanese Refugees?
George Bisharat
US
Aid to Israel is Out of Hand
Dave Lindorff
How the US Press Squelches Bush Impeachment Drive
Norman Solomon
Smoke a Marlboro, Then an Iraqi: How Media War Images Distort
Not Inform
Christopher Brauchli
The Generosity of Credit Card Companies
Aharon Shabtai
A Poet's Letter on the Occupation
Andrew Cockburn
How
Many Iraqis Have Died Since the US Invasion in 2003?
January 7 /
8, 2006
Lawrence Velvel
The
NYT's Unconscionable Decision to Sit on the NSA Story for a Year
James Petras
AIPAC on Trial: Them or US
J.L. Chestnut
Racism and Injustice in Alabama's Courts
Mike Ely
The Dead Miners in Sago
Andrew Wilson
The Dying of Ariel Sharon
Lila Rajiva
Two Moms Go to Capitol Hill
William Cook
The Rape of Palestine
Ramor Ryan
The Sub Motorcycle Diaries: On the Road with the Zapatistas
Thomas Kleine-Brockhoff
An Interview with Michael Scheuer on the CIA's Rendition Program
Peter Montague
Inherit the Wind: the Global Spread of GMO Crops
Ron Jacobs
Would Ethan Allen Pay to Protest?
Neve Gordon
Images of Real Eco-Terrorism in Twaneh
Fred Gardner
Business as Usual in San Diego
Josh Mahon
Idaho Timber Industry Leader Advocates Violence Against Green's
Mom
Dr. Susan Block
Abramoff Family Values: the Lobbyist Who Screwed Us All
Jeffrey St. Clair
Playlist: What I'm Listening to This Week
Poets' Basement
Albert and Engel
Website of the Weekend
Bush Crimes Commission
January 6,
2006
José
Pertierra
Posada
Carriles May Soon Hit the Streets
Joe Allen
Gary Freeman's Struggle: a Black Radical from the 1960s Fights
Extradition to the US
Winslow T. Wheeler
Huge Defense Budget, Lousy Equipment
John Bomar
A Former NSA Officer on Snoopgate: the Squawkers Should be Congratulated
Jason Leopold
Snoop and Shred
Norman Solomon
Axis of Fanatics: Netanyahu and Ahmadinejad
Robert Pollin
Remembering
Harry Magdoff: the Man Who Explained the Empire
January 5,
2006
Scott Boehm
Big
Profits, Buried Lives: Bulldozing the Dead in New Orleans
Zoltan Grossman
New
Challenges for the Antiwar Movement
Heather Gray
Whistling
Dixie Yet Again
Haninah Levine
Simple
is Dangerous: the Pentagon's Plan for a Manhattan Project on
IEDs
Pierre Tristam
The Sham of Homeland Security: a West Virginia Parable
Remi Kanazi
Stroke of Luck?: Political Hemorrhage in Israel
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon
Meets His Maker
Kathleen and
Bill Christison
What Hillary Clinton Doesn't Know About Palestine
January 4,
2006
Ron Jacobs
Pity
the Miner: A-Diggin' My Bones
Lila Rajiva
Terror
Hits Bangalore
Huibin Amee
Chew
Why
the War is Sexist
Pat Williams
How the West Turned: Biting the Hands That Steal
Linda Milazzo
The House That George and Jack Built: Ownership Society Meets
the Entrepreneurial Style
Nick Dearden
The Fantasy of "Even-Handedness": Blair's Cynical Policy
on Palestine
James Petras
Evo
Morales: All Growl, No Claws?
Website of
the Day
Rat Out a Lobbyist for Jesus
January 3,
2006
James Ridgeway
Pakistan,
Saudi Arabia and 9/11: How Much Did the Bush Administration Know?
Laith al-Saud
Iraqi
Intellectuals and the Occupation: an Interview with Dr. Saad
Jawad
Dick J. Reavis
Border
Walls: the View from Mexico
Joshua Frank
Hillary Clinton, AIPAC and Iran
Rochelle Gause
Inside Rafah: Collective Punishment as Normalcy
Missy Comley
Beattie
How My Mother Went from a Republican to a Screaming Progressive
Paul de Rooij
A Glossary of Dispossession
January 2,
2006
Paul Craig
Roberts
A
Gestapo Administration
Clancy Sigal
A Trip to the Far Side of Madness
Cindy Sheehan
A Tour of Europe: Friends Don't Let Friends Commit War Crimes
Alexander Cockburn
A
NYT Editorial Contemplates Iraq
|
Weekend
Edition
February 18 / 19, 2006
Who
Is Osama? Where Did He Come From? How Did He Escape? What About
Those Anthrax Attacks?
A Half-Dozen Questions About 9/11 They Don't
Want You to Ask
By WERTHER
The events of September 11, 2001 evoke
painful memories, tinged with a powerful nostalgia for the way
of life before it happened. The immediate tragedy caused a disorientation
sufficient to distort the critical faculties in the direction
of retrospectively predictable responses: bureaucratic adaptation,
opportunism, profiteering, kitsch sentiment, and mindless sloganeering.
As 9/11, and the report of the commission charged to investigate
it, fade into history like the Warren Commission that preceded
it, the questions, gaps, and anomalies raised by the report have
created an entire cottage industry of amateur speculation--as
did the omissions and distortions of the Warren Report four decades
ago. How could it not?
While initially received as definitive by a rapturous official
press, the 9/11 Report has been overtaken by reality, not only
because of unsatisfying content--like all "independent"
government reports, it is fundamentally an apology and a coverup
masquerading as an exposé--but because we now know more:
more about the feckless invasion of Iraq, more about the occupation
of Afghanistan and the purported hunt for Osama bin Laden, more
about the post-9/11 stampede to repeal elements of the Bill of
Rights, more about the rush to create the Department of Homeland
Security, an agency to "prevent another 9/11," which,
in retrospect, is plainly about cronyism, contracts, and Congressional
boodle.
Many of the amateur sleuths of the 9/11 mystery have based their
investigations on microscopic forensics regarding the publicly
released video footage, or speculations into the physics of impacting
aircraft or collapsing buildings. But staring too closely at
the recorded traces of subatomic phenomena involved in a one-time
event can deceive us into finding the answer we are looking for,
as Professor Heisenberg once postulated. Over 40 years on, the
Magic Bullet is still the Magic Bullet: improbable, yes, but
not outside the realm of the possible.
But there is surprisingly little discussion of the basic higher-order
political factors surrounding 9/11, factors that do not require
knowledge of the melting point of girder steel or the unknowable
piloting abilities of the presumed perpetrators. Let us proceed,
then, in a spirit of detached scientific inquiry, to ask questions
the 9/11 Commission was unprepared to ask.
1. Who is Osama bin Laden, and where did he come from?
On this point, the report retreats
into obfuscation. While acknowledging that he had something to
do with resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the report
suggests, without explicitly so stating, that the links between
Osama and the United States were practically nonexistent. This
will not parse: until the present Global War on Terrorism, the
CIA's operation against the Red Army in Afghanistan was the biggest
and most expensive covert operation in the agency's history.
The 9/11 Report provides no convincing documented refutation
of Osama's links with the CIA, given that the agency was running
a major war in which he was a participant. Similarly, the report's
authors did not plumb the informal U.S. government connections
with the same Saudi government whose links with the bin Laden
family could have provided a cut-out for any CIA-Osama relationship.
[1]
2. When were Osama's last non-hostile links with the U.S.
government?
Consistent with its view of
Osama's relationship with the CIA during the anti-Soviet enterprise,
the 9/11 Report ignores the possibility that he may have had
a continuing relationship with the U.S. government, particularly
with its intelligence services. The report brushes this hypothesis
aside with a footnote to the effect that both the CIA and purported
second-ranking al Qaeda figure Ayman al Zawahiri deny a relationship.
[2]
One may doubt the veracity of Langley's denials of a relationship
with Osama bin Laden and his associates, given the lack of truthfulness
of its earlier statement to the Warren Commission about not having
had a relationship with Lee Harvey Oswald. Or in alleging that
an employee named "Mr. George Bush" whom the agency
cited in its reporting of the events of 22 November 1963 was
a completely different person from the George Bush who
subsequently became the 41st U.S. president, after serving as
Director of Central Intelligence.
Likewise, Mr. Zawahiri's assertion of not having received a
penny of CIA funds deserves the searchlight of skeptical scrutiny.
What the report describes as Zawahiri's "memoir" is
actually a broadside published in a London-based newspaper in
December 2001, i.e., after the events of 9/11. It was
obviously intended as a call to the Muslim faithful for a holy
war against the infidel desecrator of the holy places; would
such a person, conscious of the need to gain recruits in a war
of pure faith against the Great Satan, have confirmed having
been on the payroll of his principal enemy? It is no more likely
than for the current President of the United States, in drawing
parallels between the war in Iraq and World War II, to advert
to the fact that his grandfather's bank was seized by the U.S.
government in 1942 for illicit trading with the Third Reich.
Indeed, U.S. intelligence agencies have had, purely as a function
of their charters, relationships with most of the world's scoundrels,
con-men, and psychopaths of the last 70 years: from Lucky Luciano
and the Gambino Mob, to Reinhard Gehlen and Timothy Leary, to
the perpetrators of the massacre of 500,000 people in Indonesia
in 1965, to the Cuban exiles who blew up an airliner in 1976
[3], to such shady characters as Ahmed Chalabi and his friend
"Curveball." Among such a gallery of murderous kooks,
bin Laden and his cohorts do not especially stand out.
More dispositive than these speculations, however, are the very
real connections between Washington and Islamic jihadists in
the Balkans throughout the 1990s. The report hints at this relationship
by mentioning the presence of charity fronts of bin Laden's "network"
in Zagreb and Sarajevo. In fact, the U.S. government engaged
in a massive covert operation to infiltrate Islamic fighters,
many of them veterans of the Afghan war, into the Balkans for
the purpose of undermining the Milosevic government. The "arms
embargo," enforced by the U.S. military, was a cover for
this activity (i.e., using military force to keep prying eyes
from seeing what was going on).
A key Washington fixer for the Muslim government of Bosnia was
the law firm of Feith and Zell. Yes, Douglas Feith, one of the
principal conspirators involved in launching the Iraq war under
the banner of opposing Islamic terrorism, was a proponent of
introducing Islamic terrorists into South Eastern Europe. Do
the "Islamofascists" of pseudo-conservative demonology
accordingly seem less like satanic enemies and more like puppets
dangling from an unseen hand? Or perhaps the analogy is incorrect:
more like a Frankenstein's Monster that has slipped the control
of its creator.
3. How did the President of United States React to the August
6 2001 Presidential Daily Brief?
Although the August 6 PBD had
been mentioned in the foreign press since 2002, it did not come
to the attention of official Washington until then-National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice impaled herself upon the hook of 9/11
Commission member Richard Ben Veniste's artful line of questioning
in mid-2004. Blurting out the title of the PBD, "Bin Laden
Determined to Strike in U.S.," she let the cat out of the
bag--or perhaps not. Having opened Pandora's Box, the commissioners
displayed no troublesome curiosity about its contents.
What concrete measures did the president take after receiving
perhaps the most significant strategic warning that any head
of state could have hoped to receive about an impending attack
on his country? Did he alert the intelligence agencies, law enforcement,
the Border patrol, the Federal Aviation Administration, to comb
through their current information and increase their alert rates?
Did the threat warning of the PBD (granted that it did not reveal
the tail numbers of the aircraft to be hijacked), in combination
with the numerous threat warnings from other sources [4] elicit
feverish activity to "protect the American people?"
Not that we can observe.
So what was the actual response of the U.S. government? Here
the 9/11 Report exhibits autism. As nearly as we can determine
from contemporaneous bulletins, the president massacred whole
hecatombs of mesquite bushes and large-mouthed bass, perfected
his golf swing, and hosted various captains of industry in the
rustic repose of Crawford, Texas. In other words, he presided
over the most egregious example of Constitutional nonfeasance
since the administration of James Buchanan allowed Southern secessionists
to take possession of the arms in several federal arsenals. The
9/11 Commission's silence on this point is an abundant demonstration
of its role as an apologist, rather than a dispassionate truth-teller.
The testimony of federal officials about what they did up to
and during the attacks is telling, in so far as the false and
misleading statements of witnesses provide clues. Ms. Rice, her
tremulous voice betraying nervousness, averred, against the plain
evidence of the public record and common sense, that a PBD stating
that Osama bin Laden was determined to strike within the borders
of the United States was too ambiguous to take any action.
Likewise, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft may have perjured
himself when he denied under oath that acting FBI Director Thomas
Pickard came to him on July 5, 2001 with information of terrorist
plots--information that the Attorney General "did not want
to hear about anymore," as NBC News reported on June 22,
2004. It might be considered a matter of Ashcroft's word against
Pickering's, except for the fact that Pickering had a corroborating
witness.
4. Who wrote the script for the rhetorical response to 9/11?
The smoke was still rising
from the rubble of the World Trade Center complex and the Pentagon
when the unanimous and universal cry erupted in government circles,
and was relentlessly amplified by the media, that this was "war,"
not a criminal act of terrorism. How very convenient that this
war, declared against a diffuse and stateless entity, would trigger
long-sought legal authorities and constitutional loopholes which
would not apply in the case of a criminal act. [5] Torture, domestic
spying, selective suspension of habeas corpus, all the unconstitutional
monsters whose implications are only clear four years after the
event, all slipped into immediate usage with the rhetorical invocation
of war.
This was not merely war, it was unlimited war, both in the sense
of total war meant by General Ludendorff (civilian rights being
trivial), and in the sense of lacking a comprehensible time span.
"A war that will not end in our lifetimes," said Vice
President Cheney on Meet the Press on the very Sunday
following the attacks. How could he be so sure during the fog
of uncertainty following the strike?
If bin Laden and his followers were merely a limited number of
fanatics living in Afghan caves, as we were assured at the time,
why did the Bush administration relentlessly advance the meme
that a decades-long war was inevitable? Could not a concerted
intelligence, law-enforcement, and diplomatic campaign, embracing
all sovereign countries, have effectively shut down "al
Qaeda" within a reasonable period of time--say, within the
period it took to fight World War II between Pearl Harbor and
the Japanese surrender?
Four years on, Vice President Cheney, doing a plausible imitation
of the radio voice of The Shadow, continues to publicly
mutter, in menacing tones of the lower octaves, that the war
on terrorism [6] is a conflict that will last for decades. [7]
This at the same time as the junior partner of the ruling dyarchy,
the sitting president, is giving upbeat speeches promising victory
in the war on terrorism (i.e., Iraq, the Central Front on the
War on Terrorism) against a papier maché backdrop
containing the printed slogan "Strategy for Victory."
It is curious that no one--not the watchdogs of the supposedly
adversary media, nor the nominal opposition party in Washington,
nor otherwise intelligent observers--has remarked on this seeming
contradiction: victory is just around the corner, yet the war
will last for decades. Quite in the manner of the war between
Eastasia and Oceania in 1984.
In earlier times, this contradiction would have seemed newsworthy,
if not scandalous. Suppose President Roosevelt had opined at
the Teheran Conference that the Axis would be defeated in two
years. Then suppose his vice president had at the same time traveled
about the United States telling his audiences that the Axis would
not be defeated for decades. An American public not yet conditioned
by television would at least have noticed, and demanded some
explanation.
So question number 4 concludes with a question: why does the
U.S. government hive so firmly to the notion of a long, drawn-out,
indeterminate war, when Occam's Razor would suggest the desirability
of presenting a clear-cut victory within the span of imagination
of the average impatient American--a couple of years at most?
Or is endless war the point?
5. Why did the mysterious anthrax attacks come and go like a
wraith?
For those in immediate proximity
to the events, the September 11attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon were frightening in the extreme, but they had
not the slow accumulation of dread that the anthrax scare of
October 2001 presented. Far more than any anomaly concerning
9/11 itself, the anthrax mystery is the undecoded Rosetta Stone
of recent years.
The anthrax attacks were the most anomalous terrorist attacks
in history: clever, successful, unpunished, causing five deaths
and a billion dollars' damage. Yet never repeated. This alone
makes them remarkable in the annals of criminal activity, but
there is more--the intended victims (at least those with an official
position) were warned in writing of their peril in sufficient
detail that they could take steps to administer an antidote.
Is this characteristic of terrorist attacks by "al Qaeda,"
or by any known Middle Eastern terrorist group?
Except for the ambiguous first attack (which killed a National
Enquirer photo editor), all the deaths resulting from the anthrax
plot were incidental--mail handlers and innocent recipients of
mail which had been contaminated by proximity to the threat letters.
Evidently the West Jefferson anthrax strain was more powerful
and had greater accidental effects than the plotters had intended.
But what did the plotters intend, if they did not will the deaths
of the addressees of their anthrax letters? It was pure coincidence,
perhaps, that the anthrax scare was at its height, producing
psychosomatic illness symptoms among members of Congress and
staffers, just as the USA PATRIOT Act was wending its way through
the legislative process. This measure, which originated among
the same Justice Department lawyers who legally opined that torture
was wholesome, was rammed through the Congress after enactment
of the authorization of the use of force in Afghanistan. Why
is this sequence significant?
The then-majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Tom Daschle, wrote
a curious op-ed in the Washington Post four years after
the events just described. [8]. In attempting to refute the administration's
allegation that it had been granted plenary wiretap powers in
the Afghanistan authorization, he stated that he and his Senatorial
confreres explicitly rejected an administration proposal to authorize
an effective state of war within the borders of the United States
itself.
Given the administration's repeatedly demonstrated refusal to
accept any limitation on its powers, it is logical that the rebuff
on the war powers authorization was followed by the prompt submittal
of the Justice Department's draft of the PATRIOT Act, containing
many of the domestic authorities the Bush White House had sought
in the use of force legislation. How doubly coincidental that
two of the limited number of addressees of the threat letters
should have been the offices of Daschle himself, and Sen. Patrick
Leahy, then-chairman of the committee of jurisdiction over the
PATRIOT Act.
Needless to say, the measure was passed by an even more comfortable
margin than that enjoyed by the 1933 Enabling Law in the Reichstag.
[9] Notwithstanding buyer's remorse exhibited by many members
of Congress, and current efforts to amend its more onerous provisions,
it appears we are saddled with the main burdens of its edicts
in perpetuity.
How the government placed this perpetual burden on its citizens
is bound up with the mysterious anthrax scare of October 2001,
an outrage that, unlike 9/11, does not even merit an official
explanation. No one has been charged.
6. Why did Osama bin Laden
escape?
"Wanted, dead or alive!"
"We'll smoke 'em out of their caves!" All Americans
know the feeling of righteous retribution that attended the hunt
for Osama bin Laden in the autumn and winter of 2001. Yet, suddenly,
it fizzled out and became subsumed in attacking Iraq and its
oilfields.
We know the explanation. Somehow, bin Laden escaped in the battle
of Tora Bora, because "the back door was open." Only
after the invasion of Iraq, more than a year later, was there
general acknowledgement that resources intended for Afghanistan
had been diverted to the buildup for Iraq. The public was lead
to believe that supplemental appropriations for Afghanistan were
siphoned into the Iraq project beginning about mid-2002.
But the strange apathy about Osama's whereabouts began sooner
than that. In a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations, then-Senate
Intelligence Committee Bob Graham states the following:
"I was asked by one of the senior commanders of Central
Command to go into his office [this presumably means the CENTCOM
Commander, GEN Tommy Franks. Underlings do not summon senior
Senators into their offices]. We did, the door was closed, and
he turned to me, and he said, 'Senator, we have stopped fighting
the war on terror in Afghanistan. We are moving military and
intelligence personnel and resources out of Afghanistan to get
ready for a future war in Iraq.' This is February of 2002
[emphasis added]. 'Senator, what we are engaged in now is a manhunt
not a war, and we are not trained to conduct a manhunt.'"
Senator Graham elaborates on this matter in his book, Intelligence
Matters, on page 125:
"At that point, General
Franks asked for an additional word with me in his office. When
I walked in, he closed the door. Looking troubled, he said, 'Senator,
we are not engaged in a war in Afghanistan.'
"'Excuse me?" I asked.
"'Military and intelligence
personnel are being redeployed to prepare for an action in Iraq,'
he continued. 'The Predators are being relocated. What we are
doing is a manhunt. We have wrapped ourselves too much in trailing
Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar. We're better at being a meat
axe than finding a needle in a haystack. That's not our mission,
and that's not what we are trained or prepared to do.'"
In the first excerpt, the military
officer might be ambivalent about the change in mission, merely
saying that the U.S. military is supposedly not trained for conducting
manhunts. The second excerpt provides more substance, suggesting
that Franks himself agrees that looking for Osama bin Laden is
a mug's game ("We have wrapped ourselves too much in trailing
Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar.")
There we have it: as early as February 2002, the U.S. government
was pulling the plug. Or was it even earlier? Gary Berntsen,
a former CIA officer, says in his book Jawbreaker that
his paramilitary team tracked bin Laden to the Tora Bora region
late in 2001 and could have killed or captured him if his
superiors had agreed to his request for an additional force of
about 800 U.S. troops. But the administration was already gearing
up for war with Iraq and troops were never sent, allowing bin
Laden to escape.
Now, Berntsen is a typical Langley boy scout who buys into most
of the flummery about the war on terrorism; but it is precisely
for that reason that his testimony is worthwhile. Here is no
ideological critic of the Bush administration and its foreign
policies--on the contrary, he shares many of its assumptions.
Like fellow Agency alumnus Michael Scheuer, he has experienced
the cognitive dissonance of dealing with the administration's
policies at first hand, and wishes to report on his findings.
Is it plausible that the United States Military, disposing of
1.4 million active duty troops and a million reservists, could
not scare up 800 additional troops to capture what was then characterized
as a fiend in human form? Perhaps the then-Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Richard Myers, explained it best in
a CNN interview on 6 April 2002, well after the hunt for bin
Laden had apparently been concluded:
"Well, if you remember,
if we go back to the beginning of this segment, the goal has
never been to get bin Laden." [10]
What can one conclude from this series of questions? If the 9/11
mystery is like other great, mysterious events--such as the Kennedy
assassination--the course is probable. For a year or two, raw
emotion over the event forecloses inquiry; for the next several
years after that, the public's attention wanes, and the desire
to forget the painful memory predominates.
In a decade or so, though, some debunker will bring new facts
into the public arena for the edification of those Americans,
then in late middle age, who will view 9/11 as an intellectual
puzzle: far from the urgent concerns of their daily lives.
Many people may, by that time,
accept that the official explanation is bunk, and suspect that
the government had once again tricked the American public, those
ever-willing foils in the eternal Punch-and-Judy show. But the
majority will neither know nor care about obscure international
relationships during a bygone era.
In 1939, the English author Eric Ambler wrote a brilliant and
now-disregarded novel whose theme was that the political events
culminating in World War II were indistinguishable from the squalid
doings of ordinary criminals. Let us quote from that novel,
The Mask of Dimitrios:
"A writer of plays said
that there are some situations that one cannot use on the stage;
situations in which the audience can feel neither approval, sympathy,
nor antipathy; situations out of which there is no possible way
that is not humiliating or distressing and from which there is
no truth, however bitter, to be extracted. . . . All I know is
that while might is right, while chaos and anarchy masquerade
as order and enlightenment, these conditions will obtain."
Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based
defense analyst. Werther can be reached at: werther@counterpunch.org
[1] Bob Woodward's 1987 book
Veil describes the informal connections between personages
in the U.S. government and the Saudi government, including the
ubiquitous Prince Bandar. A tête á tête
between CIA director William Casey and the Prince supposedly
resulted in a false-flag "terrorist" bombing in Beirut
to retaliate against the bombing of the Marine barracks there
in 1983. Regrettably, the dead were mainly civilians.
[2] 9/11 Commission Report, 23rd footnote to chapter two,
page 467.
[3] This is the case of Cuban "freedom fighter" Luis
Posada Carriles, who is suspected of sending the jet-borne Cuban
Olympic fencing team to Valhalla in order to express his opposition
to Fidel Castro. The incumbent administration, otherwise so steadfastly
opposed to international terrorism, has been resistant to extraditing
Mr. Posada --no doubt the administration is casting an eye on
Florida's electoral votes.
[4] To include the Phoenix Memo, FBI agent Colleen Rowley's urgent
bulletins from Minnesota, tips from foreign intelligence agencies,
warnings from the Federal government to its high-ranking government
placemen not to fly by commercial airliner, the contemporaneously
noted presence of art students-cum-Mossad agents within two blocks
of 9/11 operative Mohammed Atta, and other indicators.
[5] Long sought by Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld, whose formative
and traumatic experiences in the executive branch were shaped
by their revulsion against attempts by Congress, the federal
bench, and the American people, to restrain Richard M. Nixon's
assertion that the Constitution does not apply to a sitting president.
[6] The phrase "war on terrorism" is, as many people
have commented, a somewhat hazy conception, being a war on a
tactic, much as if FDR had declared war on naval aviation after
the attack on Pearl Harbor. Significantly, the popular mind has
contracted this phrase into "the war on terror," an
even more illogical coinage. If the U.S. government is truly
at war against a mental state that gives rise to ill-defined
dread, it should disestablish itself forthwith, to the benefit
of our rights, our bank balances, and our physical safety.
[7] "Cheney
Warns of Decades of War," BBC, 6 October 2005.
[8] "Power
We Didn't Grant," by Sen. Tom Daschle, Washington
Post, 23 December 2005.
[9] The Enabling Law passed the Reichstag by a vote of 444-94,
whereas the PATRIOT Act passed the House by a margin of 357-66,
and the Senate by a vote of 98-1. Curiously, the Enabling Law
was supposed to sunset in four years: on April Fool's Day, 1937,
precisely paralleling the four-year expiration of many of the
PATRIOT Act's provisions. Perhaps the eerie similarity reflects
the influence of Nazi legal scholar Carl Schmitt on neoconservative
lawyers of the Bush administration like David S. Addington, John
Yoo, and Viet Dinh.
[10] News transcript: Gen. Myers Interview with CNN TV, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2002/t04082002_t407genm.html
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