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Today's
Stories
August 30,
2004
Shaun Joseph
The
Hypocrites of TheNaderbasher.com
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"
Sex, Drugs & the Blues!
Serpents in the Garden
CounterPunch's
Sizzling New Book on Culture and Sex is Now Available
Click here to purchase
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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August
30, 2004
The
Sound of Marching, Charging Feet, Boy...
Sunday
in Manhattan
By
DAVID LINDORFF
Manhattan.
The record march of up to half a million
anti-Bush, anti-war demonstrators here on Sunday, on the eve
or the Republican National Convention, was an astonishing victory
of ordinary people over cynical political manipulation and intimidation.
For weeks, the Republican mayor
of New York, Michael Bloomberg, apparently acting at the behest
of the Bush campaign, had sown confusion about how police would
handle protesters, and had sought to make a successful march
impossible.
The big issue had been what
to do with hundreds of thousands of people once they had finished
walking. There are few open spaces in Manhattan large enough
to accommodate the kinds of numbers protest organizers were expecting
and hoping to attract, and the mayor, cynically professing concern
about the well-being of the park's grass, was blocking access
to the one obvious assembly place that could handle, and that
in the past has easily accommodated, over half a million people-Central
Park's Great Lawn.
Leaders of the group United
for Peace and Justice, the umbrella organization that organized
Sunday's protest demonstration, made what appeared to have been
a tactical error in caving in to Bloomberg's pressure by agreeing
two months ago to an alternative assembly permit to use the lower
stretch of the West Side Highway running along Manhattan's west
side, but pressure from constituent organizations and rank-and-file
protesters eventually led UFPJ to backtrack and tell the city
that the West Side Highway location was  unacceptable-as
it would have been.
In the end, with no rally permit
at all, the official plan was for the march to go ahead anyway,
running from 14th Street and Seventh Avenue, up to Madison Square
Garden, site of the GOP Convention, across to Fifth Avenue, and
back down Fifth Ave. to Union Square at 14th Street, with no
concluding rally. But in announcing these last-minute arrangements,
organizers and other groups all added, with a wink, that they
hoped demonstrators would then make their way independently up
to Central Park and the Great Lawn for an informal gathering.
All the while, the city administration
and police kept announcing that they planned to have 37,000 police
on duty, along with many other law enforcement personnel from
Postal Inspectors to State Police and federal officials, in reserve.
Announcements were also made that police would be armed with
rolls of plastic handcuffs, as well as a newly purchased 150-decibel
sound generator designed to disable protesters.
The intention of all this information,
as well as Bloomberg's adamant refusal to offer a realistic and
reasonable assembly point for marchers, was to sow fear and anxiety
among potential protesters to keep attendance at Sunday's event
as low as possible.
The strategy was a massive
failure, as even the New York Times, normally dismissive of protests
and quick to diminish the numbers of attendees in its reports,
estimated that half a million people marched, making this New
York City's largest political rally in the last two decades,
and the largest protest at a political convention in history.
Indeed, conversations with random demonstrators suggested that
as many or more may have turned out for the march because of
the mayor's challenge to the important First Amendment right
of freedom of assembly, as were scared off by fear of disorder
and arrest.
It was clear early Sunday morning
that Bloomberg's threats against protesters regarding use of
the park had been bluster. A beefy police sergeant, eating breakfast
before heading for the march route, asked what would happen if
marchers headed for the Great Lawn, smiled and said, "Nothing.
It was stupid for the mayor to say the lawn would be closed.
There's no way even with 37,000 police that we could keep people
from getting into the park, and we're not going to try."
Adding that the grass would survive, he smiled, "Keep it
peaceful!"
In the end, despite having
endured hours of trudging along the hot asphalt pavement over
a three-mile march route in 90-degree temperatures, thousands
of demonstrators made their way to the Great Lawn for a celebratory
thumb-in-the-eye rally against the mayor. There, protesters hunted
out shady spots, while the more intrepid among them gathered
on the grass that the mayor had expressed such concern over to
spell out a big "NO"-leaving it to imagination what
was being rejected.
Republican campaign committee
hopes of a riot and thousands of arrests were dashed as police
and demonstrators alike behaved in a restrained manner. (The
arrests during the day of some 100 people virtually all involved
incidents unrelated to the march, police said.)
That didn't stop some in the
media from continuing a campaign of distortion. Immediately following
the conclusion of the march, Fox TV was focusing on demonstrators
who the network said had "gone to Central Park where they
are not allowed to be"-a blatant falsehood--while CNN was
reporting that "tens of thousands" had marched. Even
ostensibly "alternative" NPR, the following day, in
a report filed from New York by correspondent Mara Liasson, put
march attendendance at a ludicrously low 100,000.
In the end though, besides
making the mayor look like an idiot, this massive, peaceful anti-war
march in the city where 9-11 happened undermined two central
themes that the Bush campaign had hoped to project at the convention-of
the president as a unifier, and of his opponents as a nihilistic
rabble.
A golden-haired pit-bull, sporting
a cape with the hand-lettered sign "Pit Bulls for Peace,"
epitomized the way this dramatic and disciplined march had defied
mayoral and media stereotypes. "She's all love," said
her owner, as the square-jawed dog gently licked any proffered
hand.
Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing
Time: an Investigation into the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new
book of CounterPunch columns titled "This
Can't be Happening!" to be published this fall by Common
Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by
Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.
He can be reached at: dlindorff@yahoo.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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