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June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
June 12, 2002
Fran Shor
Dirty Bombs, Blowback
and Imperial Projections
Dave Marsh
Shelley
Stewart, Radio and the Birmingham Civil Rights Movement
Chris Floyd
Murder, Inc.
June 11, 2002
Omar Barghouti
On Dance, Identity and War
Robert Fisk
The Bush
Afghan Gang:
Murderers, Gangsters, Stooges
Minerva Wright
The Donkeys of the Holy Land
David Krieger
Stopping
a Nuclear War
in South Asia
June 10, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
Executioner's Last Songs
June 8/9, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Mademoiselle
M.
Or Getting Screwed in Paris
Susan Davis
Sleepless
in the Suburbs
Curing Insomnia: a new use for The Nation?
George Sunderland
"Send
in the Weekly
Standard": The Screaming Pundits Assault Corps
June 7, 2002
Michael Colby
Bush to the Nation:
You're All Cops Now
Tanweer Akram
Howard
Zinn's "Terrorism
and War": a review
David Krieger
New Security Challenges
Sam Bahour
The Palestinian
Intifada:
A Very American Struggle
Tom Turnipseed
A Crisis of Confidence
in US Leadership
June 6, 2002
Michael Colby
White House
vs. EPA:
Political Hot Air and
Global Warming
Ron Jacobs
The Indo-Pakistan Conflict:
It's Just a Shot Away
Francis Boyle
Take Sharon
to The Hague:
Prosecute Israeli War Crimes
at Jenin
CounterPunch Bulletin
60 Minutes and President Chavez's
Censored F-Word
Mark Weisbrot
Spying
and Lying:
The FBI's Shameful Past
June 5, 2002
Robert Fisk
Berlusconi the Censor
Danielle Brian
Nuclear
Plants and Terrorism
Ardeshir Cowasjee
For What Do We Fight?
George Monbiot
Kashmir
on the Brink
Michael Neumann
What is Antisemitism?
June 4, 2002
Dave Marsh
Bono the Useful Idiot
William Evan / Francis
Boyle
Kashmir:
Invoking Intl. Law to Avoid Nuclear War
Cockburn / St. Clair
The Future Wellstone Deserves
June 3, 2002
Ramdas / Makhijani
India,
Pakistan and Nukes:
A Road Map to Peace
Fran Shor
Meanwhile, Back in Afghanistan
Neve Gordon
The Caterpillar
Effect
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
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Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
Environmental Bad Guys
by James Ridgeway
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The
Phoenix Program
by Douglas Valentine
Al Gore:
A User's Manual
by Cockburn
and St. Clair
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This Explosive
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Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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June 13,
2002
Famous for 15 Seconds
How All the President's Men Buried Coleen Rowley
by Steve Perry
The daily news cycle is a hungry beast with a
short memory, so maybe it should come as no surprise that the
revelations of Minneapolis FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley came
and went so quickly. Still, you've got to credit W and company.
The administration has dispatched her story with impressive speed
and political acumen.
First they took advantage of the cover
afforded by the Rowley firestorm to announce sweeping rollbacks
in the U.S.'s meager edifice of rules against indiscriminate
domestic spying, rules spawned by the exposure of prolific FBI
abuses in the 1960s. Under the new guidelines set forth in John
Ashcroft's little-noted May 30 diktat, there is no longer
any pretense that intelligence agencies need "reasonable
suspicion" of criminal activity to mount prolonged fishing
expeditions into the affairs of private individuals.
The administration then turned to defusing
Rowley's story. Hence the rushed announcement of plans to reorganize
the entire intelligence apparatus, even though the particulars
are so ill-formed that Bush has no intention of soliciting funds
for it this year. Thus, too, the sudden fanfare regarding the
arrest of Jose Padilla a month earlier. After the Padilla story
had simmered for a couples of days, the administration cheerfully
conceded it was less than advertised. It was unlikely Padilla
would ever be prosecuted; as a Defense Department deputy told
CBS, "I don't think there was actually a plot beyond some
fairly loose talk."
Job well done. Padilla served his purpose,
which was to steal the last bit of thunder from Rowley's Congressional
testimony a few days earlier. There's no mystery as to motive:
Her disclosures concerning quashed pre-9/11 leads (along with
news of the FBI's so-called Phoenix memo and some unattended
CIA leads) called into doubt a main premise of the Bush program-the
frantic contention that what we need most going forward is a
vastly expanded repertoire of police powers and resources.
Only the most gullible could believe
that a desire to combat terror is the sole agenda here. Every
administration since Reagan's has chased after rollbacks in the
civil liberties and curbs on police power wrought in the '60s
and '70s by the civil rights movement, the Warren Court and post-Watergate
reformers. And it's usually done in the name of war, be it on
drugs, pornography, child abuse, "welfare as we know it,"
or terrorism. The present threat is certainly more real and more
precipitous than the sham domestic wars of our recent past, but
it's fair to ask how much additional security we can expect to
buy with a wholesale surrender of freedoms and privacy rights.
The answer, by FBI Director Robert Mueller's own sidelong admission,
is probably not much. Testifying before a Senate committee in
May, Mueller said that the 9/11 hijackers "contacted no
known terrorist sympathizers [and] left no paper trail. As best
we can determine, the actual hijackers had no computers, no laptops,
no storage media of any kind." In short, they seem to have
done nothing that would have made them any more visible under
the expansive new Bush/Ashcroft rules on snooping, electronic
and otherwise, than they already were.
Once the immediate embarrassment engendered
by Rowley has passed, we're bound to see her complaint spun a
different way. Why, pundits will be prompted to ask, did FBI
administrators refuse to seek a search warrant for Zacarias Moussaoui's
belongings? Another sad case of law enforcement shackled by old
liberal due process rules and PR concerns. The moral: Slip the
shackles! Let the FBI be the FBI! In truth (and Rowley says as
much) the agency had ample cause for a warrant under existing
standards, but no one in the bureaucratic daisy chain recognized
the possible significance of the case or could be bothered to
raise their heads to pursue it.
The apparent lesson here is that the
old powers of domestic surveillance are quite potent if the FBI
is doing its job. American intelligence had plenty of information
about September 11, we now know. What it lacked was the coordination
or the resolve to add two and two. Bush's new cabinet department
is supposed to remedy this, but no executive "clearinghouse"
is going to make the FBI and the CIA/NSA play well together.
Jealously safeguarding what they know, particularly from each
other, is the foundation of their political power.
The official rejoinder is obvious enough:
We have to err on the side of sacrificing freedoms and empowering
police agencies, however marginal the gains in domestic security.
The stakes are too high to do otherwise. Cold comfort, wouldn't
you say, when the most glaring problem exposed to date is the
intelligence machine's failure to do anything with the information
it already had?
Steve Perry
is a frequent contributor to CounterPunch and a columnist for
The Rake.
He can be reached at: sperry@mn.rr.com
Today's
Features
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
Amira Hass
Indefinite
Siege
Mokhiber / Weissman
Time to Put Lives Over Patents
Robert Fisk
Bush's Weird
War
Stanton / Madsen
Democracy
in Crisis:
What is to be Done?
Roldan Tomasz Suárez
Venezuela:
Five Facts
About the Coup
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