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Today's
Stories
February
4, 2004
Brian
McKinlay
Bush's Australian Deputy: Howard's
Last Round Up?
February
3, 2004
Alan
Maass
The
Dems' New Mantra: What They Really Mean by "Electability"
Nick
Halfinger
How the Other Half Lives: Embedded
in Iraq
Rahul
Mahajan
Our True Intelligence Failure
Neve Gordon
The Only Democracy in the Middle East?
Laura
Carlsen
Mexico: Two Anniversaries; Two Futures
Jordan
Green
Democratic Patronage in Northern New
Mexico
Terry
Lodge
An Open Letter to Michael Powell from the Boobs & Body Parts
Fairness Campaign
Hammond
Guthrie
Investigating the Meaningless
Website
of the Day
Waging Peace
February
2, 2004
Gary
Leupp
The Buddhist Nun in Tom Ridge's Jail
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Manners of Their Deaths: Capital Punishment in a Smoke-Free
Environment
Tom
Wright
The Prosecution of Captain Yee
Winslow
Wheeler
Inside the Bush Defense Budget
Lee Ballinger
Janet Jackson's Naked Truth
Leonard
Pitts, Jr
For Blacks, the Game of Justice is
Rigged
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Website
of the Day
Resistance:
In the Eye of the American Hegemon
Jan. 31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
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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February
4, 2004
Bush's "Independent"
Commission
Exonerating
the Spooks
By KURT NIMMO
Bush's so-called independent commission looking
into "intelligence failures" will be handpicked by
the administration. It will be similar to the 9/11 investigative
commission -- that is to say it will produce results acceptable
to Bush and the spooks. The chairman of the 9/11 commission is
Thomas Kean.
Consider Kean emblematic.
"Thomas Kean is a director (and
shareholder) of Amerada Hess Corporation, which is involved in
the Hess-Delta joint venture with Delta Oil of Saudi Arabia (owned
by the bin Mahfouz and Al-Amoudi clans)," notes Michel Chossudovsky.
"In other words, Delta Oil Ltd. of Saudi Arabia -- which
is a partner in the Hess-Delta Alliance -- is in part controlled
by Khalid bin Mafhouz, Osama's brother in law."
You'd think concerned people would be
up in arms over a commission assigned to investigate a terrorist
incident blamed on Osama bin Laden with a director who does business
with the main suspect's family. And yet nothing said about it
-- at least nothing said by the Bush Ministry of Disinformation,
otherwise known as Fox, CNN, and all the other alphabet corporate
news agencies.
A so-called "news analysis"
of the Bush commission published in the New York Times notes
that another commission -- one head up by Frank Church in the
1970s chaired to look into the dirty dealings of the CIA -- "is
remembered by many as an inquisition."
Of course, the CIA and its apologists
consider it an "inquisition" because it revealed the
true nature of the intelligence organization:
election rigging, assassination, staged military coups, and other
covert dirty tricks.
Bush will hand his commission a big wide
brush and a tub of white paint.
Intelligence "professionals"
will run the show. Porter Goss (R-Fla.), a former CIA and Army
intelligence officer, and currently the Republican chairman of
the House Intelligence Committee, "is among those who have
argued that any new intelligence inquiry should look forward,
rather than dwell on any past mistakes."
In short, Goss will make sure the closet
remains closed and the sacred territory of the Office of Special
Plans (OSP) will not be trespassed. Instead, the CIA will be
issued a mild rebuke and then it will be time to move on. For
its effort, the CIA may even be rewarded.
"Mr. Goss and others will argue
that an inquiry ought to lead Americans to understand that intelligence
gathering and analysis is, at best, an imperfect science."
Americans ought to learn one thing and
one thing only -- the CIA, DIA, NSC, and OSP are not open to
public inquiry.
"We've been watching too many James
Bond movies, to think it always comes out all right in the end.
It doesn't," Goss excoriated the American people. In other
words, the CIA (actually the untouchable OSP; in this instance
the CIA is a momentary patsy) will not be held accountable for
making up far fetched stories about Saddam's illusory WMD, lies
Bush used to invade a nation. Hey, we all make mistakes, right?
Let's move forward.
Forward means invading countries more
effectively. Both Goss and David Kay believe Bush's invasion
of Iraq was the right thing to do. The problem wasn't Rumsfeld's
OSP and its unprincipled lies about Iraq's WMD or Saddam's imaginary
connections to al-Qaeda, but rather the inability of the CIA
to penetrate Saddam's inner circle of thugs.
If Bush's commission demonstrates anything,
it will be that the CIA and other spook agencies need more power,
not less. Less oversight, not more.
According to the Bushites and Goss, the
CIA needs less political correctness and more understanding of
why the US did business with the likes of the Shah of Iran, "Papa
Doc" Duvalier, Sese Seko Mobutu, Vinicio Cerezo, Pol Pot,
Alfredo Christiani, General Suharto, and a whole lot of other
reprehensible dictators and sadists, including Sadddam Hussein.
Following the logic of Goss and Kay,
the arbitrary arrest, torture, disappearance, and killings of
political opponents in Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, the
Philippines, Chile, Nicaragua, Indonesia, the Dominican Republic,
Iran, and Iraq -- all facilitated with the assistance and encouragement
of the CIA and the US government -- is nothing less than business
as usual. Such behavior does not need to be modified. It only
needs to be accomplished more effectively.
"One option sure to be addressed
by the new commission is one already under review by the independent
panel looking into the Sept. 11 attacks," writes the New
York Times. "The idea is to establish a single director
of national intelligence, appointed to a fixed term of office
like the current FBI chief, and give that director real authority
over bodies like the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National
Security Agency, which now remain under Pentagon control."
But not the OSP, which remains unnamed.
It will continue to crank out customized "intelligence"
and feed it to Bush in preparation for invasions of Syria and
Iran. In the future, if the CIA et al want to stay out of hot
(actually lukewarm) water, they will make sure they are on the
same page with Rumsfeld and the OSP.
Maybe the new intelligence czar will
issue straight from the ranks of the OSP or Bush's inner circle.
Is it possible the grooming of Abram Shulsky or William Luti
-- both OSP hacks -- has already moved forward?
Bush's commission will not only mean
a reshuffling of the deck, but a fresh influx of cash.
"[The] attention the inquiry will
get may bring other help, like bigger budgets for agencies whose
spending has soared since the Sept. 11 attacks but that plead
for still more money for spies, satellites and other means of
collecting intelligence."
As it now stands, we don't even know
the numbers of the CIA's budget. US District judge Thomas Hogan
threw out a lawsuit in 1999 attempting to compel the government
to tell the public how much it spends on intelligence. The CIA
said the numbers are irrelevant. Hogan said revealing the budget
would provide "too much trend information and too great
a basis for comparison and analysis for our adversaries."
Adversaries -- like the American people.
"It is not a question of reluctance
on the part of CIA officials to speak to us," said Senator
Leverett Saltonstall in 1966. "Instead it is a question
of our reluctance, if you will, to seek information and knowledge
on subjects which I personally, as a Member of Congress and as
a citizen, would rather not have."
Nothing has changed in the 30 odd years
since Saltonstall made his comment. Congress does not want to
know what the CIA or the OSP does -- and they certainly don't
want you to know.
As Chalmer Johnson writes, the term "blowback"
came to be "shorthand for the unintended consequences of
U.S. policies kept secret from the American people. In fact,
to CIA officials and an increasing number of American pundits,
blowback has become a term of art acknowledging that the unconstrained,
often illegal, secret acts of the United States in other countries
can result in retaliation against innocent American citizens.
The dirty tricks agencies are at pains never to draw the connection
between what they do and what sometimes happens to those who
pay their salaries."
And that's what Bush's "independent"
commission is all about -- severing the connection between what
the CIA and the OSP do under the cover of darkness and the outcome
of their actions. It will serve as a grandstand not to reform
the agencies, but rather increase their power and magnify the
damage they inflict. It is a case of rudimentary physics: for
action there is a reaction.
Bush and Congress have bunkers.
We're expected to get by on duct tape.
Kurt Nimmo
is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New
Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html
. Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair's,
The
Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays
for CounterPunch, Another
Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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