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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.

New Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively to Subscribers: SAGAS OF BETRAYAL: The Full, Clear Story, Told by a Former CIA Analyst, of How the US Ditched Solemn Pledges; Dishonored Guarantees Stretching Back to LBJ; Lectured the Palestinians on Swapping Land-for-Peace and Then, in Clinton Time, Sold Them Down the River; The Equally Disgusting Saga of How Clinton and Holbrooke Sanctioned Indonesian Butchery of the East Timorese, Then This May Travelled to Dili to Preen at the Independence Celebration of Those Whose Slavery and Near Extermination They Had Calmly Okayed. Remember, the CounterPunch website is supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! Or Call Toll Free 1-800-840-3683

June 14, 2002

Mark Weisbrot
US Trade Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"

Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier

David Krieger
Farewell to the ABM Treaty

Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth

Steve Perry
How the Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley

June 13, 2002

Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines

Amira Hass
Indefinite Siege

Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents

Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird War

Stanton / Madsen
Democracy in Crisis:
What is to be Done?

Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela: Five Facts
About the Coup

June 12, 2002

Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections

Dave Marsh
Shelley Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement

Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.

June 11, 2002

Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War

Robert Fisk
The Bush Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges

Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land

David Krieger
Stopping a Nuclear War
in South Asia

June 10, 2002

Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs

June 8/9, 2002

Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris

Susan Davis
Sleepless in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?

George Sunderland
"Send in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps

June 7, 2002

Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now

Tanweer Akram
Howard Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review

David Krieger
New Security Challenges

Sam Bahour
The Palestinian Intifada:
A Very American Struggle

Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership

June 6, 2002

Michael Colby
White House vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming

Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away

Francis Boyle
Take Sharon to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin

CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's Censored F-Word

Mark Weisbrot
Spying and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past

June 5, 2002

Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor

Danielle Brian
Nuclear Plants and Terrorism

Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?

George Monbiot
Kashmir on the Brink

Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?

June 4, 2002

Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot

William Evan / Francis Boyle
Kashmir: Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War

Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves

June 3, 2002

Ramdas / Makhijani
India, Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace

Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan

Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar Effect

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 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

Weekend Edition
June 15/16, 2002

The Day They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What it Meant

by Daniel Wolff

I say I saw her end, but I didn't.
And how she began, nobody knows. In prison

is what the paper pretends: in a pen,
in a lab, with the gate half open,

and the wolf lunging out to get free.
As if that wasn't just the lead tot heir story

but the start of her life. Which then took off
in a streak of gray across dark green lawns

-- its ears pressed flat, its legs going hard--
so the students, walking, their books in their arms

saw something they didn't understand sprint (fast)
across what they did. Before they could ask

what it meant, she was gone. Like a dream
disappears at the edge of meaning and means

something else on the other side. Except,
of course, she wasn't a dream. As soon as she leapt

away from the curb,
she became what the drivers swerved

around: the kind of soft mistake that wakes the kids
or ruins the job or the marriage. The drivers did

what they always did: they leaned on their horns and kept
on going. Shaking, now, and wet

with panic, the wolf dove (blind)
into narrow darkness and ran for a long time

from alley to alley.
Parts of the world are like the veins in an arm: hit one deeply

enough, and it's a disappearance.
The wolf submerged into pure silence,

till she came up, across town, in a garden.
Chlorine pools. Plastic fish. Iron
deer at absurd attention. A landscape chose
to look like nature but safer than that: frozen

solid. Green light slanting through planted trees.
She must have stopped there and sampled the breeze,

maybe licked at the blood between the cracks
in her paws, fooled into thinking she could stop and relax

by blending, like everything else, into richness.
But the paper, later, quoted a witness:

"I thought," said the woman, "she looked kind of funny.
Panting like that. And without anybody.

So when she didn't move, I called the cops."
They spotted her there like you'd spot

an idea in the midst of a conversation.
And after that, came the wail of sirens

streaking across suburban blocks-- smearing the sense
and symmetry-- till she hit the link fence
by the railroad tracks. Where (foam streaking her back)
she crossed over. The winos, the women at the laundromat,

barely noticed her passing. "Take
one to know one," they kidded later. Like the mistake

of the rookie cop when he asked
if they'd seen something dark and scared run past,

and everyone pointed in different directions
-- towards the sewer, the projects, up into heaven--

till the cop had to drive away. They caught her, finally,
when the neighborhood dogs started whining

at the smell of fear in the air.
The cops simply cut off their sirens and stared,

and the howls of the dogs rose like a map
superimposed on the back

of the city. If the wolf has to be a symbol
of something, then the symbol now trembled
in knee-high grass. A vet in a pure white van pulled over:
in his trunk, a collection of tranquilizers--

on his hands, a pair of surgical gloves--
as if we became what we touched.

"We had her," the officer said, "in a corner
and were attempting to take her alive, as ordered,

when she charged. And two of my men dispatched her
before she could do any harm. Their reaction,"

he added, "was totally normal."
The paper, later, came up with a moral

by quoting the Dean of Science.
"We are saddened," he said, "by the use of violence

and the subsequent loss of learning."
But that wasn't learning I saw in the grass, turning

over and over itself till it died.
Her body was carted back to the lab, untied

on a table for the students to study, and then
what was left of the wolf was abandoned.

Which is yet another end to the story.
Except, of course, there was still the body

and the meaning of that depended, again,
on how it looked (all cut into parts) and when

and where it was (on the floor). The way
I see it, in a single movement, they

dropped the wolf down a chute to the basement
where, in a plastic bag, she escaped.

Daniel Wolff is a poet and author of the excellent biography of the great Sam Cooke, You Send Me, as well as the recent collection of Ernest Withers' photographs The Memphis Blues Again. This poem originally appeared in the Spring 1990 edition of Three Penny Review.

He can be reached at: ziwolff@optonline.net

Weekend Features

Ralph Nader
A Corporate (Crime) State

Alexander Cockburn
Tourism in Ancient Rome

David Vest
Have You Been Serviced?

Karl Kraus
A Minor Detail

Alexander Cockburn
The Terrorism of Everyday Life

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