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Today's
Stories
September 4-6,
2004
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The
Holy Empire: Who Are and What We Do
William A.
Cook
The
Day of the Lemming
September 3,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Jesus Told Him Where to Bomb
Rahul Mahajan
Bush's RNC Speech: an Annotated Response
Carl Estabrook
The
Book of Slaughter and Forgetting
Joshua Frank
The Florida of the Northwest: Oregon Dems Sabotage Nader Again
Gary Leupp
Music to My Ears: Sunday's March
James Hollander
Deja Vu in Manhattan: Assisted Political Suicide?
Mark Engler
Republicans
Among Us: a Week at the RNC, Inside and Out
Jesse Sharkey
Making Students and Teachers Pay for the Crisis in Education
Jane Stillwater
Calling the Cops on Your Own Kid
Stephen Green
Serving
Two Flags: the Bush Neo-Cons and Israel
Sex,
Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
September 2,
2004
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part 3: More Pricks Than Kicks
Max Gimble
Et Tu, Menchu? Extrajudicial Killings and Clandestine Graves
in Guatemala
James Petras
President Chavez and the Referendum: Myths and Realities
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Afghan Electoral Model: "If They Want to Vote
Twice, Let Them"
Todd Chretien & Jessie
Muldoon
Will the Democrats Expel Zell Miller?
Jack Random
Spite and Venom Day: the Turncoat and the Profiteer
Alan Maass
The Real Vietnam
Christa Allen
Contre Bush
Website of
the Day
[Redacted]
September 1,
2004
Alexander Cockburn
The
Stench of Doom
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Poor Larry Franklin
Dave Lindorff
Kerry's Litmus Test
Josh Frank
Protest in White: Not All of New York Rises Up
John L. Hess
Moles, Scoops and Flip Flops
Mike Whitney
Deconstructing Arnold
Jack Random
Kindergarten Night at the RNC
Andrew Wilson
War on the Pachyderms: Why Do Elephants Hate Us?
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: Part Two: Mark His Words
August 31,
2004
Joseph Nevins
Escapism
and Global Apartheid: The Dominican Republic & the NYTs
Matt Vidal
Beyond
Bush's Rhetoric on the Economy
Neve Gordon
Kerry and the Middle East
Dave Lindorff
Bush
the Peace Candidate?
Mike Whitney
NPR Leads the Charge for War Against Iran
Jack Random
Opening Night: Playing the War Card
Jeffrey St.
Clair
High
Plains Grifter: the Life and Crimes of George W. Bush (Part One)
CounterPunch Photo of the Day
Pete Seeger in NYC
August 30,
2004
Justin Podhur
The
Disappeared Mayor
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites at TheNaderbasher.com
Mike Whitney
Israeli Moles in the Pentagon: What More Could They Possibly
Want?
Ron Jacobs
Live, From New York: the Majority of Protesters Claimed No Candidate
David Lindorff
Sunday in Manhattan: the Sound of Marchin', Chargin' Feet, Boy
Dave Zirin
USA Basketball: The Team White America Loved to Hate
Sam Husseini
Israeli Spying on the US: a Long History
August 28 /
29, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Zombies
for Kerry
Patrick Cockburn
Najaf Ceasefire Good for Iraq, But Weakens Allawi and US
Ray McGovern
Blowing Smoke on Intelligence
Dr. Juan Romagoza
From El Salvador to Abu Ghraib: Reflections of Torture Survivor
Ray Hanania
An Israeli Spy in the Pentagon? Ridiculous!
Fred Gardner
Eddie Lepp Busted by DEA: Facing Life for Growing Medical Pot
Diane Christian
Big Men: the Better Leader Lets You Live
William S. Lind
The Desert Fox
Paul D'Amato
The Left Takes a Dive for Kerry
Joshua Frank
Greens at the Crossroads
Mickey Z.
Media Declares War on Anti-War Protests
Winslow T. Wheeler
Sen. McCain's Pork Chops: an Exchange
Justin E.H.
Smith
The New Age Racket and the Left
Thomas St. John
Burning Slaves at the Stake: On "Sinners in the Hands of
an Angry God"
Ali Tonak
Help the NYPD?
Mark Engler
New York Says "No"
Justin Felux
Haiti: the Attica of the Americas
Poets' Basement
Gelman, Albert, Ford and Hamod
August 27,
2004
Gary Leupp
Neocon
Musings
Robin Cook
The
Ghosts of Abu Ghraib
Diane Christian
Disarming
Michael Donnelly
Situational Democracy: the Show Me the Green Party?
Jack Random
4F and Other Heroes: an Army of War Resisters
Mike Ferner
"To the Swift Boats!"
Mazin Qumsiyeh
7000 Palestinian Political Prisoners
Veronza Bowers, Jr.
"You Won't Be Leaving Tomorrow"
August 26,
2004
M. Shahid Alam
The
Clash Thesis: a Failing Ideology?
Diane Christian
War
Rules: Bush is No Sun Tzu
Derek Seidman
"They're As Bad As Wal-Mart:" Starbucks Workers Get
Organized
David Lindorff
Court to RNC Protesters: Drop the Rally
Christopher
Brauchli
Signs of Dissent: the Bush in the Bubble
Stew Albert
Reporting Suspicious Activity
Mark Donham
Judgement in Athens: Give the Koreans Their Day in Court
Saul Landau
Pinochet:
the Al Capone of the Southern Cone
Website of
the Day
The Kerry 527 Ad You'll Never See
August 25,
2004
Amelia Peltz
Can
I Have 9.8 Seconds of Your Time?
Noah Leavitt
Defining and Redefining Torture
Ron Jacobs
Takin' It to the Streets: It's Not About the Election, It's About
Democracy
James Brooks
Coronado Crosses the Jordan
Akiva Eldar
How to Win the Jewish Vote: Turn Gaza into a "Mini-Afghanistan"
Gemma Araneta
Chavez's New Brand of Populism
Philip Cryan
Uribe's Boys: the Death Squads of Colombia
CounterPunch Wire
Cheney Opens the Closet Door
August 24,
2004
Jeremy Scahill
John
Kerry: the Warchurian Candidate
Gary Leupp
"We
Want Them to Go Away"
David Domke
God
Willing: an Echoing Press and Political Fundamentalism
William Loren Katz
The Meaning of Hugo Chávez: Black and Indian Power in
Venezuela
Jonah Gindin
With Chavez? Reading the International Private Media
Fran Schor
Denying Atrocities: From Vietnam to Fallujah
Joe Bageant
Driving
on the Bones of God
Website of the Day
The Great America Lockdown: a Primer for the RNC
August 23,
2004
Winslow Wheeler
Don't
Mind If I Do: Porkbarrel and the War on Terror
John Pilger
Bush
May Be the Lesser Evil
Stan Goff
Swift
Boat Dogfight
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
Notes
from the West Bank: Build, Demolish, Rebuild
Mike Whitney
The Unraveling of Afghanistan
William Blum
Brave
New World of Iraqi Sovereignty
Ralph Nader
A Letter to the Washington Post: a Shameful and Unsavory Editorial
August 21 /
22, 2004
Cockburn /
St. Clair
"They
Want Blood:" The Bi-Partisan Origins of the Total War on
Drugs
Landau / Hassen
Failing
the Mission? Form a Commission
Brian Cloughley
The
Bush Team in Iraq: Moral Cowardice, as Practiced by Experts
Josh Frank
Nader as David Duke? The ADL Wants You to Think So
Mike Whitney
Reincarnating Mengele: the Torture Doctors of Abu Ghraib
Ron Jacobs
Day Labor Blues
Mickey Z.
Shooting at Whales: 40 Years After Tonkin
Fred Gardner
Dr. Wolman Comes Out: The Cannabis Consultants
Dave Zirin
Uprising in Athens: Iraqi Soccer Team Gives Bush the Boot
Josh Saxe
Witnessing Police Brutality in LA
Yanar Mohammed
Letter from Baghdad: a Democracy of Killings and Bombings
Helen Williams
Ali's Story: a Taste of Reality from Baghdad
Michael Donnelly
Elemental and NaturalForests, Fire and Recovery
Elizabeth Schulte
The Crisis in Affordable Housing
Poets' Basement
Adler, Albert, Virgil, Ford and Krieger
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
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Labor Day Weekend Edition
September 4-6, 2004
Rotten at the
Core
Kobe
Bryant and the Price of Freedom
By
DAVE ZIRIN
Now we know the price of freedom in
the USA: eight to ten million dollars. That's how much Kobe Bryant
shelled out to his legal team to avoid a rape conviction and
four to life in a Colorado Maximum Security Prison. That's how
much it costs for a young black man to evade a trial by a jury
pool that is .5% African-American. That's how much it costs to
get out of Dodge.
It was a small price to pay.
If convicted in Eagle County, Kobe would not have shared a cell
with Martha Stewart in the Michael Milken wing of a country club
prison. He would have been grinded through the sick machine of
Colorado's sex-offense "rehabilitation" system.
Frankly, "sick" doesn't
begin to describe it. First, Kobe would likely have been denied
bail--a standard Rocky State result of a Class A felony conviction--and
then spend 60 days in a county cell waiting to be sentenced.
Then, during the 60-day waiting
period, the NBA All-Star would have been given what is called
a "penile plethysmograph test." The PPT, which plays
a determining role for sentencing, involves fitting an electric
measuring band around the penis and connecting this apparatus
to a computer. Then Kobe would be shown films of graphic sexual
violence and illegal pornography as the computer gauges his level
of "arousal and deviancy".
Former head of the Colorado
Criminal Defense Bar Dan Recht described this "program"
to SI's Rick Reilly as "Kind of Clockwork Orangish."
That's a bit of an understatement. It sounds more like Abu Ghraib
as run by Clarence Thomas.
At sentencing, probation or
a suspending sentence would be a fantasy, even for a first time
offender. The judge's only option is the state pen because of
mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines.
For Bryant, raised in Italy,
the son of a globe trotting professional basketball player, a
Colorado Maximum Security Prison would be a rude awakening. For
the first year, "he [would] be in a cell 23 hours out of
24," explains Denver trial attorney Bob McAllister. "He's
famous so the guards will make sure there's no appearance of
favoritism. They'll probably be harder on him, full-body cavity
searches, just to show him he isn't anything special."
After this first year of near
total isolation, Bryant would have had to endure a mandatory
rehab program that takes "five to eight years." According
to the program's website, the rehab would have included group
therapy, anger management, admission of guilt and a listing of
his "distorted core beliefs about self, men, women, children,
sex, family and the world."
With such a program, an outside
observer would think that Colorado must be the safest place for
women outside Vatican City. Hardly. According to the Colorado
Coalition Against Sexual Assault, one out of every six American
women has been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in
their lifetime. In Colorado, it is one in four.
But just ask Katie Hnida, the
University of Colorado female football player who was physically
abused by teammates and eventually raped. She then suffered further
abuse at the hands of the University of Colorado football coach
and administration that first ignored, then mocked, and finally
smeared her name.
Colorado's penalties for sexual
assault are not a byproduct of heightened awareness toward violence
against women any more than the US Armed Forces are now the Women's
Liberation Front in Afghanistan. Instead they are a result of
the 1990s racist crime hysteria--which bred one unjust policy
after another across the US.
Three-strikes laws, zero tolerance
policies, and mandatory minimum sentencing have left more than
two million people in this country rotting in prisons, the numbers
disproportionately black and brown. For those who don't have
ten figure salaries to spend on attorneys, punishment, torture
and 23-hour lockdowns become your new life. For women who suffer
from violence, the state may have money for the latest in deviant
pornography and erection testing computers, but don't expect
anything in the way of counseling or safe haven. There are more
animal shelters than battered women shelters in the United States,
with cuts occurring in every state and federal budget. The priority
is repression, not the rights of women.
This was obvious in the treatment
of Kobe's accuser, who was clearly pressured by an over-ambitious
and incompetent District Attorney, Mark Hurlbert, and then dragged
through hell by Kobe's attorney's Pamela Mackey and Judge Terry
Ruckriegle. They created a maelstrom of pressure swirling around
her 19 year old life, trashing every rape shield law in the process.
Her name and picture are on thousands of Internet sites. Her
medical records were leaked to the press. Her sex life in the
three days prior and following the alleged rape were ruled as
admissible. She has also received "countless death threats."
As Mike LoPresti of USA Today wrote, "Whichever side one
falls on the Kobemeter--believing he should be a pro or a con--everyone
surely understands the latest cautionary tale here, of just
what a woman must plan on enduring if she yells rape. Her life
will be turned over with shovels. Unless the suspect is wealthy,
and then it will be turned over with earthmovers."
Unfortunately neither Hurlbert,
Mackey, nor Ruckriegle will be forcibly compelled to come clean
about their "distorted core beliefs."
So what did we learn from
this putrid event known as the Kobe trial? We now know that
prison is the destination of the penniless. We know that the
wealthy have about as much chance ending up in maximum security
as Jenna and Barbary Bush have seeing combat duty in Najaf. We
know that women in 2004 are still put on trial for their own
sexual assaults. And we know that the criminal justice system
in this country is rotten and racist to its core. Frankly, we
knew all this before. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to scrub
my skin with steel wool.
Dave Zirin has a book coming out this Spring
2005, "What's My Name Fool: Sports and Resistance in the
United States (Haymarket Books). He can be reached at: editor@pgpost.com.
Weekend
Edition Features for August 7 / 8, 2004
James Petras
The
Anatomy of "Terror Experts": Meet the Mandarins of
Abu Ghraib
Fred Gardner
Run
Ricky Run: Football, Pot and Pain
Justin Delacour
Anti-Chavez Pollsters Panic: Fix Numbers; Reinvent Venezuela
Brian Cloughley
Persecuted by All; Supported by None: Who Would Be A Kurd?
Joshua Frank
The
Outsider: a Talk with Ralph Nader
Iain A. Boal
On "Shame": Warmed-Over Orientalism and Racist Projection
Chris Floyd
All About Eve: Open Season on Women in DC and Rome
Andrew Fenton
Fighting for Democracy and Justice in Haiti
Aseem Shrivastava
Saga of an Anguished Afghan
Neil Corbett
See Cuba: Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar, Mr. Bush
Carol Miller
/ Forrest Hill
Rigged Convention; Divided Party: How David Cobb Won with Only
12% of the Vote
Tarek Milleron
Breaking the Principled Voter
Donald Macintyre
The
Battle of Najaf
Ron Jacobs
Spirits of The Dead: Why I Love My Petty Bourgeois Tendencies
Mickey Z.
Kid
Gavilan's Grave: Propaganda Scores a TKO
Poets' Basement
Adler, Ford and Albert
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