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HOW HADITHA HAPPENED; WHY IT WILL HAPPEN AGAIN "You live like an animal. You learn to like killing. .. Hate civilians. Can't trust the bastards. You hate taking prisoners. You'd rather kill them. Why?" Read Vietnam vet Marc Levy's extraordinary Primer on the Whys and Wherefores of PTSD and understand what is happening in Iraq. PLUS Andrew Lack on the incredible frauds of the bottled water industry. Why you should drink tapwater out of a glass and save your money PLUS Jeffrey St Clair on the deadly secrets of America's oldest bomb factory PLUS Chris Reed on Eros and Militarization: how Japan's sexpot schoolgirls fit into the right's Re-Arm agenda. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! 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 donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! |
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Today's Stories July 1, 2006 Stephen T.
Banko June 30, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Heather Williams Burbach / Cantor Nick Dearden Michael J.
Smith Brian Concannon Virginia Tilley
Bill Quigley Ron Jacobs Paul Craig
Roberts June 28, 2006 Jorge Mariscal Greg Moses Mark Weisbrot Ramzy Baroud Dave Lindorff William S.
Lind Mike Ferner Zoltan Grossman
Marjorie Cohn Benjamin /
Jarrar William Hughes Doug Giebel Uri Avnery Alexander Cockburn
June 26, 2006 Don Santina Ralph Nader Dave Lindorff Rafael Rodriguez-Cruz Evelyn Pringle Jonathan Cook
June 23, 2006 Youmans / Erakat Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Col. Dan Smith
June 22, 2006 Marjorie Cohn Winslow T.
Wheeler Tanya Reinhart Mike Marqusee William Blum
June 21, 2006 Ramzy Baroud Patrick Cockburn Gary Leupp Greg Moses
June 20, 2006 Fred Gardner Omar Waraich Christopher Reed CP Newswire Jonathan Cook
June 19, 2006 Bill Quigley John Walsh Mike Whitney Alexander Cockburn
June 16 / 18,
2006 Kathy / Bill
Christision Joseph Nevins Farrah Hassen Greg Moses Nicole Colson John Scagliotti Mokhiber / Weissmann
June 15, 2006 Kathy Kelly Norman Solomon Ron Jacobs Sam Bahour Ramzy Baroud CounterPunch Wire Gabriel Kolko Website of the Day
June 14, 2006 Nicole Colson Jonathan Cook Joseph Schechla Michael Carmichael Evelyn Pringle Ward Churchill Rev. William E. Alberts Website of the
Day
June 13, 2006 Medea Benjamin Anthony Alessandrini Paul D'Amato Dave Lindorff John Ross Gabriel Garcia Hilton Obenzinger Yitzhak Laor Juan Antonio
Ocasio Rivera Jennifer Van
Bergen Website of the
Day
June 12, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Patrick Cockburn Mike Marqusee Lee Sustar Robert Fisk Michael J. Smith Felice Pace Jennifer Loewenstein Website of the Day
June 10 / 11,
2006 Robert Fisk Diane Christian Joe Allen Ralph Nader Fred Gardner Dave Lindorff Dave Zirin /
John Cox Dennis Perrin Greg Moses John Chuckman Michael J. Smith Roger Burbach Ira Moskowitz Sam Bahour Seth Sandronsky Michael Berg Kirsten Roberts Ron Jacobs Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Website of the
Weekend
June 9, 2006 Alexander Cockburn Paul Craig Roberts Gary Leupp Eric Ruder Evelyn Pringle Mickey Z. Michael J. Smith Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
June 8, 2006 Chris Floyd Michael Dickinson Ron Jacobs William S. Lind Joshua Frank Missy Comley Beattie Lloyd Williams Bill Christison Website of the Day
June 7, 2006 Dave Lindorff Sunsara Taylor John Walsh David MacMichael Mickey Z. Evelyn Pringle Myles Palmer Laura Ribeiro Website of the Day
June 6, 2006 Diane Christian Paul Craig Roberts Ralph Nader Norman Solomon Darmont / Genovali Manuel Garcia,
Jr. Subcomandante Marcos Patrick Cockburn Website of the Day
June 5, 2006 Bruce Jackson Chris Floyd Michael Neumann Heather Gray William Hughes David Swanson Alexander Cockburn Website of the Day
June 3 / 4, 2006 Robert Fisk James Petras Rosemary Radford Ruether Harry Clark Jeffrey St. Clair Ron Ridenour Ron Jacobs Fred Gardner Peter Montague John Walsh Greg Moses Sean Donahue Mike Whitney Dave Patten Ali Khan Robert Dotson,
MD Hammond Guthrie St. Clair / D'Antoni Poets' Basement Website of the
Day
June 2, 2006 Kathy Kelly Alan Maass Mickey Z. Dave Lindorff Chris Kutalik Sunsara Taylor Sam Husseini Mike Ferner Website of the
Day
June 1, 2006 Brian Cloughley David Peterson Lee Ballinger Jonathan Cook Mike Whitney Paul Rockwell Clifton Ross Kevin Zeese Website of the
Day
May 31, 2006 Dave Lindorff Joshua Frank Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz P. Sainath Ramzy Baroud Seth Sandronsky Mickey Z. Ralph Nader Jeffrey St. Clair Website of the Day
May 30, 2006 Lee Ballinger Jonathan Cook Gary Leupp John Ross Robert Jensen Michael Dickinson Michael Carmichael Tim Wise Harry Browne Website of the
Day
May 27 / 29,
2006 Paul Craig Roberts Kathleen Christison Kathy Kelly Christopher
Reed Lawrence R. Velvel Tom Barry Gary Leupp Col. Dan Smith Ron Jacobs Don Fitz Fred Gardner Peter Montague Raymond Garcia John Farley Seth Sandronsky Tia Steele Lenni Brenner Dr. Susan Block Scott Michael Perey Jeffrey St. Clair Poets' Basement Recipe of the
Weekend Website of the Weekend
May 26, 2006 Col. Douglas
MacGregor Brian J. Foley Michael Dickinson Missy Comley Beattie Pierre Tristam Joe Allen Kona Lowell Roger Burbach Website of the
Day
May 25, 2006 Les AuCoin Jeff Halper Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Bob Wing Elise Gould Robert Bryce Website of the Day
May 24, 2006 Michael Donnelly Patrick Cockburn Lucinda Marshall Dave Lindorff Shmuel Rosner Moshe Adler Heather Gray Pratyush Chandra Paul Craig Roberts Floyd Rudmin Website of the Day
May 23, 2006 Paul Craig Roberts Sharon Smith Sunsara Taylor Joel Whitney Alice Cherbonnier Ron Jacobs Kristen Ess Patrick Cockburn Website of the
Day
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Weekend
Edition Plus ça Change ...Lethal Injection and Other Fashion TrendsBy JUSTIN E. H. SMITH Execution by lethal injection is these days commonly described in the media as 'putting to death' (e.g., an AP article of June 28, 2006 announces: "'Railroad Killer' Put to Death in Texas" ). This phrase, along with the more overtly veterinary 'putting down', seems to suggest that the creature in question is only being relieved of its misery, that it is a being morally and biologically ready for death, and that the operation performed upon it is really just a facilitation of the inevitable. The moral acceptability, even the necessity, of the act is built into the term used to describe it. And the result of this semantic legerdemain is a passive assumption on the part of the public that lethal injection agrees with our sense of the sanctity of life and of the importance of compassionate death for all, while hangings, firing-squads, electric chairs, guillotines, and gas chambers are, in contrast, distant memories from our barbaric past. How did this shift in public perception of lethal injection come about? And how much empirical evidence as to the suffering it involves will have to be accumulated before we move on to another method (flesh-eating ants? hemlock?) and in turn denounce today's preferred technique? Numerous legal cases have recently challenged the use of lethal injection as cruel and unusual punishment, in view of the mounting evidence that, when the first drug in the cocktail, the anesthetic, is administered incorrectly, the following two drugs cause excruciating pain as they move through the veins to the heart. This evidence means that, in all likelihood, lethal injection will soon go the way of hanging and decapitation, and it is crucial at this pivotal moment that abolitionists not permit some other temporarily satisfactory, but ultimately no less cruel method to take its place. Lethal injection was first proposed in the 1880s by Julius Mount Bleyer, a New York doctor who believed that this new technique, made possible by the same medical advances that were simultaneously facilitating massive advances in public health, would be more humane, and more 'modern', than hanging. At precisely the same time, however, electricity was finding ever more applications, as prominent figures (among them Thomas Edison), described its many uses with near-utopian optimism. It was in this cultural context that Bleyer's needles were rejected at the end of the 19th century in favor of what was improbably described as a more humane alternative: the electric chair. Too many malfunctions to count soon made it clear that this was not the perfect solution either, and throughout the mid-20th century we see a number of methods tried out, none to anyone's perfect satisfaction. The British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment reports in 1954 that "[n]either electrocution nor the gas chamber have a balance of advantages over hanging. The method of lethal injections has too many difficulties but should be re-examined in light of progress in anaesthetics." In the United States, electrocution and other various methods were employed until the mid-1970s, when Oklahoma's state medical examiner, Jay Chapman, returned to the idea Bleyer had proposed nearly a century earlier, though with a somewhat more complicated recipe: "An intravenous saline drip," Chapman proposed, "shall be started in the prisoner's arm, into which shall be introduced a lethal injection consisting of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic." The method was swiftly enacted into law in Oklahoma, but first employed in Texas in 1982. It is now the sole method of execution permitted in most states, and by far the most common one actually employed. Of course, the most famous effort to humanize execution came a century before Bleyer and Edison, with the joint effort of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a doctor and member of the French Revolutionary National Assembly, and Antoine Louis, a member of the French Surgeons' Academy. Unlike the methods used under the ancien régime --hanging for commoners and decapitation with a sword for aristocrats-- the guillotine was promoted as both efficient and egalitarian. As would happen later with the electric chair and lethal injection, it was praised for its power to swiftly and painlessly dispatch lives" at least until it was discovered that a severed head can remain conscious, and even interact with doctors by means of coordinated blinks, for up to thirty seconds after its separation from the body. Even before the Enlightenment, the ideal of compassionate execution often influenced the way observers and facilitators act at the scene of the killing. The French historian Robert Muchembled has chronicled the changing attitudes towards execution in Europe from the 15th to the 18th centuries. In certain times and places, we may discern a desire for exacting vengeance on the condemned in the cruelest and most painful way possible. At other moments, the criminal is accompanied to his death by throngs of weeping nuns, who sprinkle him with holy water, and whisper to him reassuringly of God's love and of the promise of redemption, and who ensure that death arrives both swiftly and gently. Yet the more compassion is showered on the condemned, the more his death takes on the character of a human sacrifice: the pagan Greeks wept too as they led bulls to the altar, though they refrained from offering fellow humans for the appeasement of their gods. One may be touched by the nuns' compassion, yet wouldn't true compassion require simply canceling the whole affair? You can sprinkle a man's path to the injection table with rose petals, but he will hate it just as much as a gauntlet of jeers. The problem with execution is the death that results from it, not the etiquette of those who carry it out. It can only be concluded that the logic governing the periodic changes since the 18th century, from one method of execution to another, is rooted not in science, nor in moral progress, but in fashion. What dictates hanging this season, and lethal injection the next, is the same illusion of real change that makes the style-conscious now disdainful of bellbottoms, now covetous of them. We do not like to think of our moral standards as comparable to sartorial whims. Morality is supposed to be improving, while anyone with any reflective ability can see that one season's fashion musts are objectively no better nor worse than another's. Yet it is a useful exercise to take stock of what exactly the last few centuries of purportedly humanitarian efforts to improve execution methods have brought us. Capital punishment still hurts, and it still results in death. The periodic shift from one method to another, and the simultaneous denunciation of the old method, only confirms the validity in this domain of that basic law of fashion: the more things change, the more they remain the same. There are of course many who believe execution should involve suffering. Their position at least has the virtue of consistency and clarity, unlike the pseudo- humanitarian philosophy that dictates current policy. Those who long for vengeance have a true commitment, and are no vapid trend-followers. Their position is the only one to acknowledge the gravity of the act in question. It is the only one that is not motivated by bad faith. As long as we continue debating the relative politeness of lethal injection versus hanging, decapitation, etc., it is their position that triumphs by default. Justin Smith teaches philosophy in Canada. He can be reached at: justismi@alcor.concordia.ca
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann  Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair          Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid? CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues, as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.                    |
