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Pentagon Cartoons; Hollywood Fantasies into Political Policy; From Fort Wacky to Bitburg; Star Wars, the Enron of Its Day; Touching the Gipper's Hair; How Reagan Made Clinton by Alexander Cockburn; When Reagan Was King and AIDS Was Raging: Joking About the Terminally Ill by Larry Speakes and the White House Press Corps; Parallel Lives: Watt, Reagan and Brower: by Jeffrey St. Clair; Fortress Baghdad; Iraqi Fury by Patrick Cockburn; Troy, the Iliad and Iraq by Jeffrey St. Clair. In May, CounterPunch Online was read by over 20 million viewers! 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 (tax deductible) donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now!

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Today's Stories

July 8, 2004

James Petras
The Truth About Jimmy Carter

 

July 7, 2004

John Chuckman
Kerry's BBQ: a Deafening Silence of Meaning

Virginia Tilley
A Line in the Sand: Azmi Bishara's Hunger Strike

Susan Martinez
A Letter to Bill Cosby

Mickey Z
Elie Wiesel's Strange Parade

Michael Donnelly
Our Own Private Wilderness: Trusting the Land in the Inland Empire

Sean Donahue
Boston Social Forum: the Dems aren't the Only Show in Beantown

Diane Christian
Sovereignty and Freedom in Iraq

July 6, 2004

Lisa Viscidi
Fleeing Guatemala: Central Americans Risk Lives to Reach El Norte

Marc Norton
The Felonious Five Ride Again: the Supreme Court and Enemy Combatants

James Brooks
Chemical Warfare on the West Bank?

Ray McGovern
Porter Goss as CIA Director?

William Cook
Legacy of Deceit: If Dante Knew of Bush and the Neo-Cons...

 

July 5, 2004

Forrest Hylton
US Imperialism in Latin America: Sept. 11, July 4 and Systematic Torture

Chris White
A Former Marine Sgt. on the Meaning of Independence Day

Joe Bageant
Cranky Reflections on the 4th of July

Robert Jensen
Stupid White Movie: What Michael Moore Misses About the Empire

Kathy Kelly
"Two Days an' a Wake-Up"

July 3 / 4, 2004

Elaine Cassel
Bush's Police State and Independence Day

Stan Goff
ABC of Opportunism: "Progressive" Latin American Leaders Support the Coup in Haiti

Snehal Shingavi
"We Want Real Justice for Bhopal": Two Survivors Speak Out

Bruce Anderson
The Cheney-Leahy Metaphor and the Greens

Sharon Smith
Twilight of the Greens: the Chokehold of "Anybody But Bush"

Josh Frank
Ralph Nader's Revolt: an Interview with Greg Bates

Robert Fisk
Pentagon Tried to Censor Saddam's Hearing

Joe Bageant
Sons of a Laboring God: Leftnecks Unite!

Brian Cloughley
Fortress Bush and the One Law Doctrine

Justin Delacour
The Anti-Chavez Echo Chamber: Venezuela's Media Tycoons

William S. Lind
Saudi Spillover

Linda S. Heard
A Joke Called "Justice"

Greg Moses
"It's Illegal, But It's Our Right": Korean Labor Won't Back Down

Ron Jacobs
"Ain't You Proud to be White on Independence Day?"

Toni Solo
Weary of Indigenous Resistances? Just Pretend They're Not There

Dan Nagengast
Chicken Manure as Cattle Food: Safe, But Do We Want to Eat It?

Stew Albert
Brando, a Personal Recollection

Dave Zirin
From the Black Panthers to Sacheen Littlefeather: a Eulogy for Our Brando

Patrick W. Gavin
The Progressive Case for Dodgeball

Steven Rosenthal / Junaid Ahmad
The Problem is Bigger Than the Bushes: a Review of F911

Poets' Basement
Kearney, Ford and Davies

Website of the Day
Global Peace Solution

July 2, 2004

Jeffrey St. Clair
Suicide Right on the Stage: the Demise of the Green Party

Douglas Valentine
Fahrenheit 911: Mocking the Moral Crisis of Capitalism

Gary Leupp
"Just Because I Could": On Obscenities and Opportunities

Lee Ballinger
Illegal People: Kerry Opposes Immigrant Rights

Robert Fisk
Saddam in the Dock: Confused? Hardly

CounterPunch Wire
"What Law Formed This Court?": a Transcript of Saddam's Arraignment

Christopher Brauchli
Bush's Drug Card Lottery: the Price Ain't Right

Saul Landau
Buzz Words and Venezuela


July 1, 2004

Katherine van Wormer
Bush's Damaged Mind: the Madness in His Method

Joe Bageant
Is Our President a Whackjob? Does It Matter?

William James Martin
The Dogma of Richard Perle

Dave Lindorff
Bush's Evacuation Moment

Robert Fisk
Bread and Circus Trials in Iraq

Alan Maass
Green Party in Reverse

Website of the Day
Michael Moore and Israel: Blind or a Coward?

 

June 30, 2004

Kurt Nimmo
Nicholson Baker's Checkpoint: a New Kind of Anger About Bush

Tariq Ali
Getting Away with Murder in Iraq

Jennifer Van Bergen
Bush and the Detainees

Douglas Valentine
Apotheosis of the Psychopaths: Instead of Fahrenheit 9/11, Rescreen The Quiet American

David Price
Fahrenheit 9/11 Through the McCain-Feingold Looking Glass

Roger Normand
America's Criminal Occupation of Iraq

Stan Cox
Sanitized for Your Protection: Ashcroft's War on Art

Henry David Thoreau
On the Futility of Bush v. Kerry: All Voting is a Kind of Gaming

Ben Tripp
Who Dast Call Him Liar: a Rebuttal to Nicholas Kristof

 

 

June 29, 2004

Patrick Cockburn
The Cloak-and-Dagger Handover

Robert Fisk
Alice in an Iraqi Wonderland

Troy Selvaratnam
New York Times Boosts Pet Developer

Harry Browne
Bush in Ireland

Ray McGovern
The CIA According to Anonymous

Elaine Cassel
Hamdi, Padilla & Rasul: Who Really Won?

 

June 28, 2004

Patrick Cockburn / Leyla Linton
Grisly Rituals in Iraq

Amira Hass
Confronting Myths and Deadly Power

 

June 26 / 27, 2004

Alexander Cockburn
Venezuela: the Gang's All Here

Patrick Cockburn
Iyad Allawi, the CIA's New Stooge in Iraq

Dennis Hans
Once They Were Sweethearts: Cheney, the NYTs and the Myth of an Iraq Link to 9/11

Ben Tripp
Adventures in Fuel Efficiency

Dave Lindorff
That State Department Terrorism Report: What They Knew, But Didn't Tell You

Chris Floyd
Cold Irons Bound: the Russian Gambit

Ali Tonak
Contamination at Berkeley: Profit Motives, Academic Freedom and the Case of Ignacio Chapela

Keith Rosenthal
The Withering of the Anti-War Movement

Bryan Sacks
The Failure of the 9/11 Commission

Wayne Madsen
Another Case of Blowback

Thomas St. John
L. Frank Baum, Racist: Indian-Hating in the Wizard of Oz

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
American Swadeshi

 

 

June 25, 2004

Stephen Gowans
US to North Korea: "Trust Us"

Saul Landau
2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege: Bush Invests the National Treasure in Death and Destruction

Amir Butler
Iraq: the Deadly Embrace

Jack McCarthy
Another Times Plagiarism Scandal? Did Maureen Dowd Lift from the World Weekly News?

Greg Bates
Chomsky and Zinn Plan to Vote Nader

 

 

 

June 24, 2004

Gary Leupp
John Lehman on the Iraq / al-Qaeda Links

Patrick Cockburn
A Day in the Life of Col. Abu Mohammed: Defusing Bombs, Facing Death Threats

Harry Browne
On the Rebound: Bush Bounces Back...in Europe

Bill Kaufman
Another Marxist for Kerry: Joel Kovel's Sad Smear of Ralph Nader

Christopher Brauchli
Bush, Cheney and the 9/11 Commission: What Did They Know? What Did They Tell?

Rick Gioimbetti
Andrea Yates: Victim of Psychiatric Violence?

John Chuckman
Call Center ID Hypocrisy

Diana Johnstone
Kerry and Kosovo: the Lie of a "Good War"

 

 

June 23, 2004

Laura Carlsen
Bush and Castro Face Off

Dave Zirin
Barry Bonds vs. Boston: "A Flea Market of Racism"

Kurt Nimmo
From Saddam, With Love

Patricia Wolff
Foundation Wars

Mahboob A. Khawaja
"They Had Me Arrested and Shackled My Son"

Patrick Cockburn
The Pretense of an Independent Iraq

Website of the Day
The Road to Abu Ghraib

 

June 22, 2004

Dave Lindorff
The Meaning of Putin's Pronouncement: Mutually Assured Pre-emption

Ron Jacobs
Nuclear Plants in US Protectorate of Iraq?

Vanessa Jones
Coogee, Peter Garrett and Valium Earrings

Mickey Z
An Open Letter to the People of Iraq

John L. Hess
Clinton Exhales

Pedro Marset/Ex-Solidarity Committee for Pacho Cortés
An Exchange on the Case of Pacho Cortés

Bruce Jackson
Saying No to Prosecutors: Why Steve Kurtz's Colleagues Refused to Testify

Website of the Day
From Boot Camp to Boot Hill

 

June 21, 2004

Gary Leupp
Putin's Helpful Remarks

Lucson Pierre-Charles
Haiti After the Press Went Home: Chaos Upon Chaos

Cockburn / Khan
Saddam May Face Death Penalty

Uri Avnery
Irreversible Mental Damage

 

 

June 19 / 20, 2004

Patrick Cockburn
Inside the Green Zone: US is Paranoid and Isolated

Bruce Anderson
Frozen Gringos

Diane Christian
Morality and Death: a Meditation on Bush and Blake

Walter A. Davis
Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib

Josh Frank
How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother Nature

Col. Dan Smith
Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis in Sudan

Brian Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses

Christopher Brauchli
Bush and the Timken Plant, a Year Later

Prudence Crowther
Mr. Ashcroft, Deport Me!

Poets' Basement
Iqbal/Alam, Krieger and Albert

Kathy Kelly
Dying to See Their Kids

 

 

June 18, 2004

Chris Floyd
Blood Victory

Dave Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player & Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War

Justin E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American Politics

Gary Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?: Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi

 

June 17, 2004

Noel Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine

Kurt Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum

Ed Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz

Ron Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do

Dave Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"

Greg Moses
Geneva Ignored

Norm Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons

 

 

June 18, 2004

Noel Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine

Kurt Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum

Ed Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz

Ron Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do

Dave Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"

Greg Moses
Geneva Ignored

Norm Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons

 

 

June 16, 2004

Lenni Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters

Davey D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan

Daniel Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner Abuse?

Bruce Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake

Patrick Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power Facilities

Gary Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads

JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop

Mario Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers

Vicente Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who is Rodrigo Rato?

Website of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch

 

 

June 15, 2004

Harry Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe

Neve Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited

David Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI

John Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming

Dave Lindorff
God Wins in TKO

Bill Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step In

Patrick Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast

John Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo

 

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Behold, the Head of a Neo-Con!

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Dardagan, Slobodo and Williams
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July 8, 2004

More Political Effluent from Team Morality

Bush / Cheney Play the Hitler Card

By CHRISTOPHER BRAUCHLI

Democracies cannot dispense with hypocrisy any more than dictatorships can with cynicism.

Georges Bernanos We French

The honor and decency that we were promised when Messrs. Bush and Cheney entered the White House has taken a back seat in the Bush administration in recent weeks. Vice president Dick Cheney was one of the first to usher them to the back of the bus.

Mr. Cheney's attack on decency and civility may be attributed to suggestions from his doctors that it's bad for his fragile (and not particularly kind) heart to permit anger to stay pent up inside. Whatever the reason, Senator Patrick Leahy's frequent use of the H word over the past several months when questioning the vice president's activities on behalf of his former employer caused Mr. Cheney to erupt in a plume of anger and foul language when Mr. Leahy attempted to address him in a cordial manner on the floor of the United States Senate.

Mr. Leahy is not the only person in the country for whom the H word is intriguing. It is intriguing because Mr. Cheney was once H's CEO and the company has had brilliant financial success since the mantle of the vice-presidency was placed upon his shoulders by the Supreme Court. Lots of people wonder if the reason H has done so well is because Mr. Cheney, while hiding out from real and imagined terrorists, spent his time peddling influence in H's behalf. Mr. Cheney denies it. He not only doesn't like being called an influence peddler but says the decision to hire H to rebuild Iraq and pay it more than $1 billion was made by government career procurement specialists with no involvement by senior political appointees. That was, as is much of what Mr. Cheney says, a lie. A Pentagon report released June 14 said the Pentagon got the assent of senior Bush administration officials before hiring Haliburton to develop secret plans for restoring Iraq's oil facilities. The vice president's chief of staff was one of those officials. Confronted with the contradiction between Mr. Cheney and the Pentagon report, Kevin Kellems, a spokesman for Mr. Cheney said: "We stand by our earlier statements on this matter." That's as good an answer as there is when you've been caught lying.

At a picture taking session on the floor of the United States Senate, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont approached Mr. Cheney to greet him. Upon seeing the approaching senator, the vice president reportedly "recoiled." When Mr. Leahy suggested that Mr. Cheney apparently had an aversion to talking to democrats, Mr. Cheney responded by suggesting in crude terms that Mr. Leahy do the anatomically impossible and walked off in a huff.

When asked on Fox news whether the episode occurred Mr. Cheney responded by saying that that was not the sort of language he usually uses. Later he acknowledged that he had used a crude word identified in most of the media only by its initial letter but explained that he "felt better after I had done it." That, he apparently thinks, makes it alright.

Honor and decency in the White House, however, went even further back in the bus when the Republican National Committee put together a really clever video called "The Faces of John Kerry's Democratic Party." It includes snippets of speeches by former vice president Al Gore, Howard Dean, John Kerry, Richard Gebhardt and Adolph Hitler. All of the speakers except Adolph Hitler were attacking Mr. Bush. Mr. Hitler was speaking German and shouting. It is not clear at whom but the odds are it was not at Mr. Bush or Mr. Kerry. In fact it was probably a generic speech attacking people whom Hitler disliked. By including Adolph Hitler in the clip one can safely assume that George Bush who is not strong on history, believes that Adolph Hitler is somehow tied in to the Kerry campaign. Since Mr. Bush also thinks al Qaeda was linked to Saddam Hussein and that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, it's not much of a leap for him to believe that Adolph Hitler is involved in the Kerry campaign.

The video appears on Mr. Bush's reelection website, GeorgeWBush.com. A click on "Kerry"s Coalition of the Wild Eyed" or "The Many Faces of John Kerry" will activate the video. As clever as Mr. Bush is to try to link John Kerry to Adolph Hitler not everyone will immediately understand the connection. As the campaign moves on, I am sure Mr. Bush will explain the purpose of including it on his website.

Christopher Brauchli is a Boulder, Colorado lawyer. His column appears weekly in the Daily Camera. He can be reached at: brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu


Weekend Edition Features for June 12 / 13, 2004

Peter Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto and Runnymede

Team CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums

Jeffrey St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then

Gary Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?

Brian Cloughley
US Military in Crisis

Antonio Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection

Ben Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider

Joe Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"

Ron Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency

Forrest Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés

Christopher Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors

Kurt Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again

Wayne Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan

Anthony Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World

Michael Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous

Greg Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?

Susan Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban

Joseph Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground

Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st Century

Wayne Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup

Poets' Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert

Website of the Weekend
Insurgent Music

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