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Today's
Stories
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
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
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for More Stories.
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Weekend
Edition
March 20 / 21, 2004
What's in a Name?
Fence,
Barrier, Wall
By WILLIAM A. COOK
"Something there is that doesn't
love a wall."
"Mending Wall," Robert Frost
Funny how Frost's fallen boulders, the size of
bread loaves and small balls, when placed back on the other rocks
that form a separation line between pine trees and apple trees
on a New England farm, a border two or three feet high, becomes
a wall while another, constructed of cement forms 25 feet high
augmented by chain link fence topped with rolled barbed wire,
spiked by electric currents, and secured by Medieval guard towers,
becomes, as it snakes its way over 400 miles of sand hills and
green valleys, slips through towns and villages, and slithers
through the debris left by bulldozed homes and uprooted olive
groves, becomes a "fence," a "separation barrier."
Remarkable what we do with words! Brutality masked as innocence.
What lies we tell each other to hide our fears.
From Jericho to Jenin walls have played
an ironic and paradoxical role in the lives of the Jewish people.
Joshua led his people, at the Lord's command, to circle the walls
of Jericho, and he said to them "Shout: for the Lord hath
given you the city," and they shouted and the walls came
tumbling down. "And they utterly destroyed all that was
in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep,
and ass, with the edge of the sword."(6:21). But victory,
as complete and devastating as it was, turned to defeat as the
spoils of war overcame love of the Lord and "the anger of
the Lord was kindled against the children of Israel."(7:1).
What lessons might be learned from this passage from Joshua?
First and most graphically, walls do not protect a people! Determination,
the will of a people destroys walls. Secondly, the corrupt appetites
that lay hidden in the bowels, especially greed and power, destroy
the achievements of a people and corrupt its will. After 2500
years, these lessons have yet to be learned.
Frost taunts his neighbor, "Before
I built a wall I'd ask to know/ What I was walling in or walling
out,/ And to whom I was like to give offense." I would suggest
that Sharon's "Wall of Fear" walls in both the Palestinians
and the Jews, that it gives offense to those on both sides, and
it offends the moral sensibilities of any civilized person anywhere
in the world. Sharon prepared for the building of the wall by
laying its foundation in the guts of his people, fear of four
million terrorists and fear that the future offered no hope for
peace. Having bulldozed the Palestinian Authority out of relevance,
he removed the possibility of negotiations, and, by that act,
left the Jews without hope for peace, leaving him free to force
the erection of the "Wall." But there are Jews who
find the Wall odious, Jews who object to the US Congress' Resolution
371 that supports Sharon's walling in of human beings because
that resolution shows no regard for human rights violations resulting
from this wall to say nothing of its illegality as contrary to
prohibitions against occupying forces confiscating land. Jews
for Peace in Palestine, peace loving Jews in Israel, the TIKKUN
community and others around the world understand that this Wall
raises anger against the United States to new heights thus lowering,
ironically, the barriers protecting our security. Why this Wall
does not offend our representatives boggles the mind since it
makes graphic how biased this administration is against the Palestinians
and confronts the Arab world with a visible and ugly icon of
its racist mentality. The simple answer to Frost's question slithers
over the Palestinian landscape offending in its moral depravity
every human that has a soul.
Consider, as Frost suggested, how the
Wall walls in the Israeli people: it looms on the horizon a daily
reminder that they have failed to achieve their primary goal,
a peaceful assimilation of Jews from around the world into a
haven, given to them by a remorseful Europe and America, where
all could live in dignity and respect, without rancor or fear
of racism, hatred and oppression; a daily reminder that they
have walled in a poor and deprived people behind barriers that
isolate them from the community of nations, from their fields
and shops, from relatives and families, not unlike the Pogroms
suffered by the Jews in Poland, Austria, Russia, Hungary, and
Czechoslovakia; a daily and fearful reminder that someday, somewhere,
someone will scale or circumnavigate the Wall as people have
done from time immemorial - as the Huns did when they mocked
the efforts of the Chinese to keep them at bay on their side
of the Great Wall, or the Germans when they laughingly skirted
the Maginot Line - to make absurd the efforts of one people to
subdue the will of another; a daily reminder that their purported
Democracy mocks itself as it seals off an entire population
in full sight of the world community despite the vocal objection
of that community, indeed, in complete and utter disbelief that
the Jews of all peoples could undertake such a heinous act; a
daily reminder that they have created a monstrous gray monument
to the harm they have inflicted on another people, a monument
that in time will have the same effect as the march around Jericho,
"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both
man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with
the edge of their sword"; a daily reminder that visible
or no each and every name of an incarcerated Palestinian is carved
into that cement just as the names of the fallen Jews, victims
of Nazi atrocities, are carved into the marble slabs at the
Holocaust Memorial in Florida; and, finally, a daily reminder
that this Wall is but the beginning of a Wall that must stretch
north and south along the Jordanian border, further north along
the Syrian line, west along Lebanon's southern coast, and south
along the Sinai, thus completing the incarceration of the Jews
once again.
Now consider how this Wall entombs the
Palestinians: it becomes a daily reminder to the indigenous people
that they can no longer hope to return to their land, indeed,
they can't even see their land, and their longing turns inward
to wrestle with an absolute despair; it festers in the gut as
a concrete reminder of villages lost in the 1948 battles, of
the forced relocation of relatives and friends to refugee camps,
of the theft of more land in 1967 and the complete defiance by
Israel of UN resolutions to return their land, and of the world's
indifference to their plight; it looms a constant reminder to
their children that they must grow up in the shadow of the Wall
and watch the setting sun slide beneath the barbed wire and black
silhouetted forms that become for them a stark and unnatural
horizon lacking the magnificence of the receding sun and the
hope it symbolizes for the coming day; it harbors in its very
existence the seeds that grow terrorists even as it makes possible
the manufacture of bombs undetected by Israeli forces unless
they venture behind the Wall and become sitting targets for the
deranged, similar to the situation facing American troops in
Iraq, negating thereby the very reason for erecting it; it rises,
an eyesore among eyesores, in a barren landscape, a fitting symbol
of oppression and occupation that prevents the people from gaining
employment, forcing them to leave their homes in desperation,
an act much desired by the builder of the Wall; it stares down
on the people like some dumb force that feeds the hatred of the
fanatics and supplies them with an endless stream of recruits
able and willing to wreck havoc on the innocent in Israel since
Israel has inflicted this insidious presence on them; and, finally,
it begs the Palestinians to carve their names on that Wall to
remind them that they are the victims of an occupying government
that has failed to respond to their legitimate rights as expressed
in numerous UN resolutions, that has resorted to barbaric means
to assure safety for its people even as it creates conditions
that will result in deprivation and death for those oppressed.
What is this Wall but a fitting monument
for Ariel Sharon, the final stone that will be his gravestone
etched with the names of all the Palestinians he has ever slaughtered
since he was 23 years of age and began his march of destruction
into history. This is Sharon's Vietnam Memorial, and, thank God,
it is 400 miles long because he has far more than 58,000 names
to carve on its hideous surface; no glowing black marble here,
rather a gray, dull cement color appropriate to its purpose as
a memorial for the enslaved that must live in its shadow and
contemplate how a civilized world could allow the erection of
such a tomb. How absolutely sadistic are the actions of this
man who decimated the very buildings and infrastructure of the
Palestinian Authority and declared their leaders irrelevant even
as he demanded that they stop the terrorism in their midst. Having
made the conditions of peace impossible of achievement, he resorts
to the creation of the very symbol that gave credibility to the
plight of the Jews in Europe, the walls of Auschwitz-Berkenau
and turns that symbol inside out!
What is this Wall to the American whose
government is complicit in its creation? Aside from its feeble
entreaties to Sharon to stop construction and its shameful retreat
when he tells our President to shove it, this government does
nothing. Its cowardly behavior deserves nothing but our contempt.
But it acts in our name and this is what it has done: my tax
dollars and yours have paid for the factory that made the molds
that have become the Wall; our tax dollars have paid for the
architectural design of the Wall, paid the workers to pour the
cement, paid for the bulldozers that were used to clear the land
of olive groves and houses, paid the drivers of the bulldozers,
hired the men who placed the cement forms in lock step fashion
over hill and dale, erected the chain link fence and the barbed
wire, constructed the guard towers that stand like pitiful replicas
of ancient days when the only recourse to disputes was the destruction
of the powerless, not reasoned deliberations based on fairness
and justice, accepted the illegal acquisition of Palestinian
land by encircling illegal Israeli settlements, accepted as well
the theft of water in aquifers beneath Palestinian land, accepted
the necessity of continued support of this monstrous insult to
humanity that will cost the American taxpayer more and more millions
as the years go by, and, finally, and most tellingly, paid the
price of insecurity for Americans around the world as the deprived
of the world resort to the only retaliation left to them, a hatred
of America engendered by our blind support of the state that
inflicts such suffering.
"Something there is that doesn't
love a wall"; that something abhors what is not natural,
and a wall is not natural, it is a man made structure the purpose
of which is to exclude some for the alleged benefit of others.
But when that purpose denies people freedom of movement, freedom
of participation in the affairs of humankind, freedom of discourse
with their fellows, freedom of fulfillment of individual initiative,
freedom to raise a family, freedom to express opinions contrary
to the power elite, freedom of self-expression, and freedom to
believe according to their conscience, then the wall is destructive
and anathema to human society. How distant the memory that offered
UN Peacekeepers to stand between the Palestinians and the Israelis
that they might resort to deliberations not oppression. Certainly,
Sharon's Wall of Fear strangles freedom both for the Palestinian
and the Israeli. It erects a barrier to peace; it does not encourage
peace. It emblazons fear; it does not elicit hope. It stands
a monument to failure, to retaliation and to vengeance. It could
be nothing else.
William Cook
is a professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern
California. His new book, Psalms
for the 21st Century, was just published by
Mellen Press. He can be reached at: cookb@ULV.EDU
Weekend
Edition Features for March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
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