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Inside Iraq's Resistance HOT HOT HOT New CounterPunch Print Edition! Meet actual Iraqis and not just Western caricatures. Laith al-Saud interviews top man in Iraq's national resistance. It's not just Abu Ghraib and bids to kill Fidel Castro. Torture and assassination are integral parts of America's imperial machine. Don't miss Andrew Wimmer's searing journey into the soul of a nation that tortures as a way of life. Plus Alexander Cockburn on the killing of General Kassem. PLUS Sam Sillen's rollicking exhumation of Edmund Wilson as Malthusian Trostskyite. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only edition of CounterPunch ... CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! 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 donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Get CounterPunch's Print Edition By Email! Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683 or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558

Today's Stories October 13, 2005 Werther The Two-Headed Monster October 12, 2005 Omar Waraich Britain and the Quake: Mean and Stingy William Cook Voices Behind the Entombment Wall Phil Gasper Countdown to a Legal Lynching Dave Lindorff Impeachment Now and Then: Clinton, Bush and the Polls Matt Vidal Capital, Power and Class John Gautreaux New Orleans will Never be the Same Diana Johnstone Srebrenica Revisited: Using War as an Excuse for War Mark Weisbrot The IMF Has Lost Its Influence Brian J. Foley Gitmo Tribunals Endanger Public Safety Website of the Day Columbus Day Lies   October 11, 2005 Roger Morris / Steve Schmidt Strategic Demands of the 21st Century Lila Rajiva Live from New Orleans: Abu Ghraib Bill Quigley New Orleans: Leaving the Poor Behind Again Paul Craig Roberts Natural Born Liars Dave Lindorff Recruiters in Schools: No Lie Left Untried Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Suspect Thy Neighbor Mitchel Cohen Showdown at Chuck E. Cheese Tariq Ali Pakistan will Never Forget This Horror Website of the Day L'Heure Americaine   October 10, 2005 Cindy and Craig Corrie Rachel's Words Live Joshua Frank Washington's War Dems Gideon Levy The Beautiful Life Without Arafat Alan Wallis The Fight for Free Speech at Union Square Mickey Z. In Defense of Liars CounterPunch News Service Vermont Independence Convention Paul Craig Roberts The Police State is Closer Than You Think Website of the Day Dylan's Chronicles   October 8 / 9, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Rhetoric and Reality in the Business of Getting Rid of Black People Ralph Nader Katrina and the Growls of Greed Jennifer Van Bergen New American Law: Legal Strategies in the Dharfir Case Saul Landau An Oily Religious Dream Jeff Halper Setting Up Abbas Lenni Brenner The Millions More Movement and Zionism Nikolas Kozloff Bird Flu and Bush Brian Cloughley Training Soldiers in Iraq Alice Slater A Nobel Prize for Chernobyl? John Gautreaux A View from Cajun Country Fred Gardner Does the Controlled Substances Act Mean What It Says? Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Leveethan Approach M.G. Piety Rot in the Ivory Tower: Collusion, Cover-Up and Kierkegaard Tom Gorman The Hitchens Doctrine Mike Whitney Bunker Days with George Aseem Shrivastava Beyond the Wasteland: Lessons from Afghanistan Ben Tripp Religion, an Epistle Poets' Basement Albert, Engel and Ford   October 7, 2005 Larry Johnson The Plame Case: the Real Issues Will Youmans Why Do We Hate Our Freedom? Recruiters and Thugs on Campus Dave Lindorff Bird Flu: Evolution or Intelligent Design? Judith Scherr Haiti's Children's Prison Russell D. Hoffman Nukes for Peace, Revisited?: Nobel Prize Debacle Jared Bernstein Katrina and Jobs Jennifer Van Bergen New American Law: the Case of Dr. Dhafir Website of the Day FBI Witchhunt October 6, 2005 P. Sainath "Take That, Tom Friedman": Indian Masses Reject NYT's Neoliberal Idol Again Scott Parkin When Antiwar Activists Get Mugged Paul Craig Roberts Blundering into Syria Andréa Schmidt Haiti's Biometric Elections: a High-Tech Experiment in Exclusion Dave Lindorff Easy Money in the Big Easy Joshua Frank In Defense of Lew Rockwell M. Junaid Alam Jackboots at George Mason Matthew Koehler Cock and Bull on the Bitterroot Robert Pollin Is the Dollar Still Falling?   October 5, 2005 Heather Gray Militarization is Not an Answer for Reconstruction: the Case of the Philippines Robert Jensen Is Bush a Racist? Ramzy Baroud Bush's Final Choice: America or the Empire Col. Dan Smith Keeping Promises to Iraq: "Everything is Bad" Dave Zirin Barry Bonds Laughs Last Paul Craig Roberts Liberal Guilt? How the Neocons Took Over Alan Maass Doing the Right Wing's Dirty Work   October 4, 2005 Nikolas Kozloff Shocking the Two Party System: a Political Opportunity for Sheehan and the Antiwar Mvt. Mike Roselle Houston, You've Got a Problem Joshua Frank The Scoop on Harriet Miers John Chuckman War Porn: What the Gruesome Images Say Alan Farago Storm Warning for Jeb: Developers, Hurricanes and the Keys Mickey Z. An Interview with Thaddeus Rutkowski Christine & Ethan Rose Home Depot Exploits Hurricane Victims Gary Leupp An Earlier Empire's War on Iraq: a Lesson from Roman History Website of the Day Rodney Crowell on Bob Dylan   October 3, 2005 Vijay Prashad Desperation at Holyoke Paul Craig Roberts Condi Rice: Gunslinger Joshua Frank An Interview with Cindy Sheehan Seth Sandronsky The Hiring Crisis for Black Teens Jeffrey St. Clair The Great Green Scare   October 1 / 2, 2005 Cockburn / St. Clair Democrats Sink Deeper into the Ooze Dave Marsh A Direction Home: a Message from Bob Dylan Ralph Nader Gutless, Spineless and Clueless Flavia Alaya Showdown at Sheriff's Plaza Uri Avnery The Gladiators: Sharon's Victory Chris Kutalik The Battle at Northwest Airlines Greg Moses Bill Bennett's Book of Cracker Virtues Brian J. Foley I Gave My Copy of the Constitution to a Pro-War Vet Nicole Colson Hunger Strike at Gitmo Ray McGovern Abu Ghraib is a Command Responsibility Fred Gardner Ricky Williams Takes a Late Hit Justin Felux Save America from Crime: Abort Every White Baby! Will Youmans "Free the P": Hip-Hop for Palestine Mike Ferner What Else Shall We Do? David Krieger The War in Iraq: a Broken Covenant Agustin Velloso Samson Returns to Gaza Saul Landau The Constant Gardener: Serious Cinema Ben Tripp Right Down the Middle Poets Basement Peddibone, Crowell, Engel and Albert Website of the Weekend Holler If Ya Hear Me   September 30, 2005 Mary Geddry Why I Marched: They Made My Son Kill Paul Craig Roberts Bush is Cooking Up Two New Wars Dave Lindorff Judith Miller's Strange Voluntary Jail Time Gregory Wilpert "The Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" Benjamin Dangl "Gringo, Go Home:" an Interview with Orlando Castillo James McMurtry We Can't Make It Here Anymore T.R. Johnson Return to the Ninth Ward   September 29, 2005 Sen. Russ Feingold Bush's Iraq War is Weakening America Carl G. Estabrook Obama the Enabler Ramzy Baroud Rhetoric and Reality of War Dave Lindorff What Opposition Party? Mike Whitney Brownie's Comic Opera Jozef Hand-Boniakowski What Noble Cause? Gary Handschumacher Getting Arrested with Cindy Sheehan Winslow T. Wheeler No Leaders in Congress Against This War: Lame Democrat and Tame Republicans   September 28, 2005 Dr. Eyad Serraj Letter from Gaza: What Disengagement Sounds Like William A. Cook Bush's Security Barrier Liaquat Ali Khan The Invention of Porno Torture Mike Whitney Apartheid Justice in America Joshua Frank Sheehan and the Democrats: Anybody Home? CounterPunch Wire New Orleans Prisoners Abandoned to Floodwaters Chris Genovali Cutting the Bears Out of the Great Bear Rainforest Linn Washington, Jr. White Affirmative Action: How John Roberts Got to the Top   September 27, 2005 Forrest Hylton Political Murder in Puerto Rico: a Matter for Our Movement Jason Leopold The Decline and Fall of Bill Frist Jennifer K. Harbury Torture is US Policy, Not an Aberration Ray McGovern Torture and Cowardice: Why are American Religious Leaders Silent? Mike Ferner Bringing the War Home: Arrested at the Pentagon Antony Loewenstein When the Truth Comes to Town: What You Can't Say About Israel in Australia Harry Browne Live from Hollywood: the IRA Disarms   September 26, 2005 Rafael Rodriguez Cruz Assassination in Puerto Rico: the FBI Murders a Legend Joshua Frank Democrats Flee Peace Protests Lamis Andoni The Railroading of Taysir Alony Mike Marqusee Those Pesky "Urban Intellectuals": Blair, Spiro Agnew and the Antiwar Movement Rep. Cynthia McKinney They Can't Fool Us Anymore Ron Jacobs A Small March for Me, a Giant March for the Antiwar Movement Norman Solomon The Media and the Antiwar Movement John Chuckman Bush in a Bottle Paul Craig Roberts America is Running Out of Time   September 24 / 25, 2005 Kathy and Bill Christison Polluting Palestine: Settlements & Sewage Ralph Nader Stealing the Moment: How Corporations Cashed in on Katrina Saul Landau The Terrorist Resumé of Luis Posada Greg Moses A Movement Gathers Power on the Sorrow Plateau Roger Burbach Hugo Chavez's Mission Vijay Prashad America's Shame Laura Carlsen After NAFTA Robert Fisk When Man and Nature Conspire to Expose the Lies of the Powerful Dave Lindorff A Gusher Called Katrina: They Fix Oil Prices, Don't They? Kirkpatrick Sale / Thomas Naylor Secession from the Empire: the Middlebury Declaration Maj. Anthony Milavic The US Military and Torture: the View of a Former Interrogator Brian Concannon, Jr. Haiti: the Time for Action is Now   September 23, 2005 CounterPunch News Service In Which, Phil Donahue Demolishes Bill O'Reilly Diane Farsetta Katrina and Right-Wing Think Tanks Robert Sandels Militarizing the Market Christopher Brauchli Bush: the Good Samaritan for Corporations Alan Farago Bird Flu Takes Flight Dave Zirin When Sports & Politics Collided: Redeeming the Olympic Martyrs of 1968 Maxine Conant A Simple Test for Bush David Price Workers Get Hit Twice: Katrina and Davis-Bacon Profiteering   September 22, 2005 Smith, Wood, Leas, and Greenfield Which Way Forward for the Green Party? a Report from Tulsa Patrick Cockburn Iraqis: This Government has No Authority Manuel Garcia, Jr. Thinking is Religious Freedom Lucia Dailey Trial of the St. Patrick's Four: Day One Mokhiber / Weissman Are You a Speed Freak? Russell D. Hoffman The Nukes in Rita's Path Kona Lowell God's Hurricane? Jason Leopold GOP Fiscal Policy and Katrina Website of the Day Robert Pollin on the Global Economy   September 21, 2005 Jorge Mariscal Military Recruiters: Counselers or Salesmen? Linda S. Heard Double Standards in Iraq: Basra Brit Jailbreak Joshua Frank NYPD Unplugs Cindy Sheehan Eric Ruder "The Problem in Iraq is the US": an Interview with Camilo Mejia Pierre Tristam The Struts and Bull Presidency Dave Lindorff The Real Story of the German Elections Mike Ferner Sit Down in DC Missy Comley Beattie Bush's Katrina Bling Bling Jeffrey St. Clair W Marks the Spot Website of the Day New Orleans: Survivor Stories   September 20, 2005 Steve Breyman Toxic Gumbo: Katrina and Environmental Justice George Galloway Et Tu, Greg Palast? Patrick Cockburn What Happened to Iraq's Missing $1 Billion? M. Shahid Alam Gen. Musharraf and Israel: Is Pakistan Selling Out? Mike Whitney The Gitmo Hunger Strikers Winslow T. Wheeler It's Not Rocket Science Niranjan Ramakrishnan Back to the Future: North Korea's Gambit Paul Craig Roberts Will Neocon Fanaticism Destroy America?         Subscribe Online

October 13, 2005 Imperial Hacks: Right and Left The Two-Headed Monster By WERTHER "Corrupted by wealth and power, your government is like a restaurant with only one dish. They've got a set of Republican waiters on one side and a set of Democratic waiters on the other side. But no matter which set of waiters brings you the dish, the legislative grub is all prepared in the same Wall Street kitchen." Huey Long Regular readers of these musings might suspect that we have been rather hard on our anointed Zeus and the pantheon of lesser gods he commands, namely, the President and the Republican Party. In truth, criticizing the GOP is like dynamite fishing: hardly sporting, but appealing nevertheless when one is in a certain mood. Certainly, the Party of Lincoln provides rich material for humor of a rather sarcastic kind: a war on Iraq that may be the greatest strategic disaster in our history; doubling the national debt in fewer than five years; the tomfoolery of Freedom Fries [1]; a tragic-comic ineptitude at protecting U.S. citizens from the mere vicissitudes of weather while simultaneously claiming the divine power to coerce all mankind into an earthly utopia; the nomination to the Supreme Court of Miss Harriet Miers. Indeed, the planned investiture of Miss Miers in the robe of Hammurabi promises further entertainment for those who cherish an obscene sense of humor. Her confirmation hearing is sure to produce a Vesuvius-like outpouring of quackery from the Robertsons, Falwells, Dobsons, and LaHayes which has rarely been matched in our history. One has to go back to the solemn asininities of William Jennings Bryan, Billy Sunday, and Aimee Semple McPherson to find their equal. Under the GOP, America has truly entered a second Golden Age of politico-religious kitsch. But after savoring the ludicrous aspects of the current Republican hegemony, one sobers up and returns to the mundane. Perpetual war, Argentine levels of debt, and rampant corruption are hardly conducive to national survival, let alone prosperity. Isn't it time to turn the fat hogs out and give the lean hogs a shot? When the party in power behaves like Peronists without the extravagant wardrobe, one is tempted to believe that those who nominally oppose that party would be more rational and public spirited. That is one of the cherished myths of the National Story, at any rate. A glance at this morning's Washington Post op-ed page, the bulletin board of America's nomenklatura, quickly brings one back to earth. In a piece entitled "Using Our Leverage: The Troops," Senator Carl Levin (D-MI), a presumed scourge of the Bush administration, argues that a subtle threat to pull out U.S. troops would be the inducement ­ or sub rosa extortion ­ to get the Iraqi politicians to settle their differences and ultimately defeat the insurgency. [2] On one level, this is an outburst of unbelievable naiveté. One can only imagine that Senator Levin has been brainwashed [3] by his various Potemkin tours of the Green Zone so as to believe that the U.S. military occupation is actually popular. It is not. On the other hand, we can assume that the minority of Iraqis who have battened on to the occupation for their own position or profit already have their visas in order should the plug ever be pulled. Prospectively, they are just one more émigré group poised to drive up rents in Arlington, Virginia. The idea that the "threat" to pull out U.S. military forces leverages anything is an exercise in delusion. This is what Democrats concoct when desperation forces them to devise an alternative Iraq policy. At a deeper, moral level, Senator Levin's thesis is even more dispiriting. Our troops, you must understand, are "leverage." Flesh and blood Americans are dying every day, but they are leverage: counters, pawns, bargaining chips in a game of Realpolitik. If the Democrats want to prove they are "tough enough for the job," i.e., as coldly cynical as the other party, they are off to a promising start. Further clues as to the Democrats' thinking on Iraq can be gleaned from their reaction to the President's recent address to the National Endowment for Democracy. Enough criticism has been leveled at this address ­ for its high-school Wilsonianism, Chautauqua tent revivalism, and geo-strategic mumbo-jumbo ­ that further analysis here would merely be cruel. [4] It is, however, worth a moment's detour to expatiate on the venue of the President's speech, the National Endowment for Democracy, and what it signifies for the relative positions of the two American political parties. NED is one of the most hellish of all the spawns of your out-of-control government. Year in and year out, be the administration Democrat or Republican, NED has survived as a curious hybrid: part taxpayer-financed slush fund for the two political parties (NED being a money conduit for the International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute for International Affairs), and part general staff organization for ideological zealots. Thus NED achieves the best of both worlds: it provides sinecures for out-of-work party hacks and at the same time serves as an incubator of neoconservative-oriented "regime change" schemes while avoiding accountability as a supposedly non-governmental organization. Its President, Carl Gershman, a social democrat, has run the outfit since its founding in 1983. Its intellectual traditions rest on many of the same ideologically leftist European roots as the neoconservatives' visions do. To expand Huey Long's metaphor, NED is the ultimate in political fusion cuisine. Where else could former Trotskyites, Democratic Socialists, and Hegelians appreciatively receive the lucubrations of a fourth-generation Republican oligarch who coincidentally receives instructions from God about his conduct of foreign policy? This situation explains why NED is a darling of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, that Pravda of crony capitalism and neocon tub-thumping. It is said that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) also likes NED. As a custodian of Senatorial campaign largesse, Senator McConnell presumably knows whereof he speaks. Further heightening the irony, his wife, Elaine Chao, is the ferociously anti-labor Secretary of Labor; yet union hacks serve amicably on the NED board, while the Free Trade Union Institute, a labor front group, cheerfully sucks at the taxpayer teat via NED. Enough, then, about NED as the apotheosis of bipartisan collusion to entangle the American people in endless foreign intervention and meddling. What of the Democrats' reaction to the President's ruminations on Iraq and the Middle East delivered at that institution? A glance at the pages of The Congressional Record for 6 October 2005 reveals this response from the Democrats' chief foreign policy spokesman and one of Capitol Hill's most sententiously tedious windbags, Senator Joseph Biden. Mr. BIDEN. "Mr. President, today, in his speech to the National Endowment for Democracy, President Bush gave a vivid and, I believe, compelling description of the threat to America and to freedom from radical Islamic fundamentalism. He made, in my view, a powerful case for what is at stake for every American. "Simply put, the radical fundamentalists seek to kill our citizens in great numbers, to disrupt our economy, and to reshape the international order. They would take the world backwards, replacing freedom with fear and hope with hatred. If they were to acquire a nuclear weapon, the threat they would pose to America would be literally existential. "The President said it well. The President is right that we cannot and will not retreat. We will defend ourselves and defeat the enemies of freedom and progress." [5] Senator Biden goes on to criticize the administration on the usual counts: not enough progress in training Iraqis, not enough "engagement" with our allies, not enough electricity production, and so forth. But for all this carping about the consequences of invading Iraq, he fails to criticize the premises that created justification for the attack in the first place. For it was the fantasy of imposing democracy at bayonet point, of "defeating the enemies of freedom and progress," that was the ideological cover for the invasion of Iraq. The first three paragraphs of Senator Biden's statement are fully equal to the worst balderdash of Richard Perle or Kenneth Adelman. Senator Biden makes a revealing slip when he says later, ". . . once we decided to focus on Iraq, we went to war too soon. We went without the rest of the world, and we went under false premises." What does "too soon" mean? Does he mean that, once Osama bin Laden would have been dispatched in Afghanistan, it would have been OK to invade Iraq? But the premises still would have been false. Would he have waited until Colin Powell harangued the Security Council into submission? The premises, as Hans Blix and Mohammed El Baradei could have attested, would still be false. It may be plausibly objected that Senator Biden is a special case. He is assumed to be hag-ridden by the demon ambition, and sees himself as a future Secretary of State, if not President. Accordingly, he must appease the panjandrums of the foreign policy establishment. Other Democrats, surely, are not so robotically in synch with every whim, tic, and tropism of the Received Wisdom. One would imagine his colleague, Senator Richard Durbin, who is both more "populist" than Senator Biden as well as coming from a part of the country (the Midwest) that is less prone to foreign policy hallucinations than the Bos-Wash Corridor from whence Senator Biden sprang, to look with an eye a great deal more jaundiced than his Delaware counterpart. A few minutes after Senator Biden's rodomontade, Senator Durbin also unburdened himself on the subject of Iraq. [6] While not as obvious a bit of bosh as Senator Biden's, and while asking a few sensible questions, Senator Durbin's address falls prey to the same fallacies that befall all of our political class when they are trying to be "constructively" critical. We need metrics and timetables, he says, and we need to know when the troops will come home (although he is not so sufficiently bold as to propose a date). The jarring note is his wish that the administration would be enlightened enough to "engage" (that word again) Iraq's neighbors and Muslim nations in an effort to stabilize Iraq. The short answer is that the instant Iraq became "stable" (i.e., once the U.S. military were to get its hands free), at least two of Iraq's neighbors, Syria and Iran, would immediately become subject to extreme diplomatic coercion at the very least, or possibly even military invasion. What government would voluntarily undertake its own suicide? As for other Muslim countries, why would they bail out the United States by consenting to send troops to substitute for the Anglo-American occupation? If they did not consent to it two and one half years ago, when the tide of affairs appeared to be running in the Americans' favor, why would they do it when the tide, as far as the Americans are concerned, is now ebbing quickly? Quite apart from the fact that any Muslim government which sent troops to Iraq would risk being overthrown by its own subjects. Senator Durbin's rhetorical pussyfooting is typical of the Democratic Caucus at large. However much they may rail about Halliburton or nonexistent WMD, the Democrats are, for the most part, a licensed opposition hoping one day to capture the spoils of Washington and rule according to most of the assumptions of the people they will have vanquished. This attitude accounts for the initiative of Senators Clinton and Biden, among several others, to add 80,000 personnel slots to the Army. One may object on practical grounds that it is hard enough to maintain the Army at the present level. That objection, however, probably misses the point: their proposal is purely a rhetorical flourish, designed to reassure anxious soccer moms that the Democrats are "tough enough" to protect their little Megans and Jennifers from rampaging dictators. As the final count in this bill of indictment, we turn to Richard Holbrooke, President Clinton's United Nations ambassador and perpetual scold about the imperative for "muscular internationalism" ­ presumably with himself and his friends doing the muscle-flexing. In a 7 October interview with the ever-voluble Chris Matthews, Mr. Holbrooke disgorged himself of the following axiom: HOLBROOKE: "The Democratic Party is the party that has created . . ." (CROSSTALK) HOLBROOKE: ". . . the modern American national security system, from Woodrow Wilson right straight through. "The Republicans have now adopted a lot of old Democratic rhetoric about values, democracy, freedom, human rights, while continuing to argue for a large defense budget. That is where the Democrats always were. The Republicans were more isolationists, or, in the Nixon-Kissinger period, Realpolitik people." [7] There we have it. It's really the Democrats whom we should thank for the modern American national security system that got us where we are today in Iraq, with Korea and Vietnam as way-stations. We should therefore humbly thank the Democrats for the Espionage Act of 1917, passed at the behest of President Wilson. Under its draconian provisions over 450 conscientious objectors were imprisoned, including Rose Pastor Stokes, who received ten years in the penitentiary for stating, in a letter to the Kansas City Star, that "no government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people while the government is for the profiteers." Even a presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, was sentenced to prison for the crime of criticizing the sainted Woodrow. One wonders: is this sort of Wilsonianism muscular enough for Mr. Holbrooke? If not, there is the National Security Act of 1947, creating a National Security Council unanswerable to Congress, and removing from the American people the right to the information James Madison believed necessary for a constitutional republic when he said, "a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives." [8] Yes, all calumny by Karl Rove to the contrary, the Democrats can hold their heads up high. They are a pillar of the National Security State. As for the American people, if they have a shred of intelligence or self-respect left, they will find themselves another restaurant. Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based defense analyst. [1] The originator of the term Freedom Fries, the Hon. Walter Jones (R-NC), has recanted his support for the Iraq war after seeing one body bag too many. He is as a consequence a pariah in his own party. The Chairman of the House Administration Committee, the Hon. Robert Ney (R-OH), who actually imposed the renaming of the pomme frit on the House restaurants, now threatens to be ground up in the clanking machinery of the Abramoff scandal. Rarely has justice ever been so symmetrical. [2] The Washington Post, 10 October 2005, p. A19 [3] One speculates the process may be similar to MACV's magical mystery tours of Vietnam for the benefit of American politicians. After glimpsing the truth about Vietnam, would-be Republican presidential candidate George Romney exclaimed "I've been brainwashed!" Retorted Senator Eugene McCarthy, "in his case, a light rinse would have been sufficient." [4] It has been slammed in such diverse quarters as Jim Lobe (mainstream critic of the war), Justin Raimondo (libertarian), and Srdja Trifkovic (paleo-conservative). [5] The Congressional Record, p. S11189. [6] Ibid., pp. S11190-91. [7] Transcript of Hardball with Chris Matthews, http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9646367/ [8] James Madison, from a letter to W.T. Barry, 4 August 1822.                                       CLARIFICATION ALEXANDER COCKBURN, JEFFREY ST CLAIR, BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY, COUNTERPUNCH We published an article entitled "A Saudiless Arabia" by Wayne Madsen dated October 22, 2002 (the "Article"), on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org (the "Website"). Although it was not our intention, counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests, or could be read as suggesting, that Mr Al Amoudi has funded, supported, or is in some way associated with, the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism. As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi's lawyers, we have removed the Article from the Website. We are pleased to clarify the position. August 17, 2005

Coming in the Fall from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann Click Here to Advance Order Philosopher Michael Neumann's Devastating Rebuttal of Alan Dershowitz WHAT'S INSIDE Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair