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Today's
Stories
November 13, 2003
Jack McCarthy
Veterans
for Peace Booted from Vet Day Parade
Adam Keller
Report
on the Ben Artzi Verdict
Richard Forno
"Threat Matrix:" Homeland Security Goes Prime-Time
Vijay Prashad
Confronting
the Evangelical Imperialists
November 12, 2003
Elaine Cassel
The
Supremes and Guantanamo: a Glimmer of Hope?
Col. Dan Smith
Unsolicited
Advice: a Reply to Rumsfeld's Memo
Jonathan Cook
Facility
1391: Israel's Guantanamo
Robert Fisk
Osama Phones Home
Michael Schwartz
The Wal-Mart Distraction and the California Grocery Workers Strike
John Chuckman
Forty
Years of Lies
Doug Giebel
Jessica Lynch and Saving American Decency
Uri Avnery
Wanted: a Sharon of the Left
Website of the Day
Musicians Against Sweatshops
November 11, 2003
David Lindorff
Bush's
War on Veterans
Stan Goff
Honoring
Real Vets; Remembering Real War
Earnest McBride
"His
Feet Were on the Ground": Was Steve McNair's Cousin Lynched?
Derek Seidman
Imperialism
Begins at Home: an Interview with Stan Goff
David Krieger
Mr. President, You Can Run But You Can't Hide
Sen. Ernest Hollings
My Cambodian Moment on the Iraq War
Dan Bacher
The Invisible Man Resigns
Kam Zarrabi
Hypocrisy at the Top
John Eskow
Born on Veteran's Day
Website of the Day
Left Hook
November 10, 2003
Robert Fisk
Looney
Toons in Rummyworld: How We Denied Democracy to the Middle East
Elaine Cassel
Papa's Gotta Brand New Bag (of Tricks): Patriot Act Spawns Similar
Laws Across Globe
James Brooks
Israel's New War Machine Opens the Abyss
Thom Rutledge
The Lost Gospel of Rummy
Stew Albert
Call Him Al
Gary Leupp
"They
Were All Non-Starters": On the Thwarted Peace Proposals
November 8/9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
November 7, 2003
Nelson Valdes
Latin
America in Crisis and Cuba's Self-Reliance
David Vest
Surely
It Can't Get Any Worse?
Chris Floyd
An Inspector
Calls: The Kay Report as War Crime Indictment
William S. Lind
Indicators:
Where This War is Headed
Elaine Cassel
FBI to Cryptome: "We Are Watching You"
Maria Tomchick
When Public Transit Gets Privatized
Uri Avnery
Israeli
Roulette
November 6, 2003
Ron Jacobs
With
a Peace Like This...
Conn Hallinan
Rumsfeld's
New Model Army
Maher Arar
This
is What They Did to Me
Elaine Cassel
A Bad
Day for Civil Liberties: the Case of Maher Arar
Neve Gordon
Captives
Behind Sharon's Wall
Ralph Nader and Lee Drutman
An Open Letter to John Ashcroft on Corporate Crime
November 5, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Just
a Match Away:
Fire Sale in So Cal
Dave Lindorff
A Draft in the Forecast?
Robert Jensen
How I Ended Up on the Professor Watch List
Joanne Mariner
Prisons as Mental Institutions
Patrick Cockburn
Saddam Not Organizing Iraqi Resistance
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Centaurs
from Dusk to Dawn: Remilitarization and the Guatemalan Elections
Josh Frank
Silencing "the Reagans"
Website of the Day
Everything You Wanted to Know About Howard Dean But Were Afraid
to Ask
November 4, 2003
Robert Fisk
Smearing
Said and Ashrawi: When Did "Arab" Become a Dirty Word?
Ray McGovern
Chinook Down: It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Vietnam
Woodruff / Wypijewski
Debating
the New Unity Partnership
Karyn Strickler
When
Opponents of Abortion Dream
Norman Solomon
The
Steady Theft of Our Time
Tariq Ali
Resistance
and Independence in Iraq
November 3, 2003
Patrick Cockburn
The
Bloodiest Day Yet for Americans in Iraq: Report from Fallujah
Dave Lindorff
Philly's
Buggy Election
Janine Pommy Vega
Sarajevo Hands 2003
Bernie Dwyer
An
Interview with Chomsky on Cuba
November 1 / 2,
2003
Saul Landau
Cui
Bono? The Cuba Embargo as Rip Off
Noam Chomsky
Empire of the Men of Best Quality
Bruce Jackson
Midge Decter and the Taxi Driver
Brian Cloughley
"Mow the Whole Place Down"
John Stanton
The Pentagon's Love Affair with Land Mines
William S. Lind
Bush's Bizarre Korean Gambit
Ben Tripp
The Brown Paste on Bush's Shoes
Christopher Brauchli
Divine Hatred
Dave Zirin
An Interview with John Carlos
Agustin Velloso
Oil in Equatorial Guinea: Where Trickle Down Doesn't Trickle
Josh Frank
Howard Dean and Affirmative Action
Ron Jacobs
Standing Up to El Diablo: the 1981 Blockade of Diablo Canyon
Strickler / Hermach
Liar, Liar Forests on Fire
David Vest
Jimmy T99 Nelson, a Blues Legend and the Songs that Made Him
Famous
Adam Engel
America, What It Is
Dr. Susan Block
Christy Canyon, a Life in Porn
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Albert & Guthrie
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher David Vest: Winner of 2 Muddy Awards for Best
Blues Pianist in the Pacific Northwest!
October 31, 2003
Lee Ballinger
Making
a Dollar Out of 15 Cents: The Sweatshops of Sean "P. Diddy"
Combs
Wayne Madsen
The
GOP's Racist Trifecta
Michael Donnelly
Settling for Peanuts: Democrats Trick the Greens, Treat Big Timber
Patrick Cockburn
Baghdad
Diary: Iraqis are Naming Their New Babies "Saddam"
Elaine Cassel
Coming
to a State Near You: The Matrix (Interstate Snoops, Not the Movie)
Linda Heard
An Arab View of Masonry
October 30, 2003
Forrest Hylton
Popular
Insurrection and National Revolution in Bolivia
Eric Ruder
"We Have to Speak Out!": Marching with the Military
Families
Dave Lindorff
Big
Lies and Little Lies: The Meaning of "Mission Accomplished"
Philip Adams
"Everyone is Running Scared": Denigrating Critics of
Israel
Sean Donahue
Howard Dean: a Hawk in a Dove's Cloak
Robert Jensen
Big Houses & Global Justice: A Moral Level of Consumption?
Alexander Cockburn
Paul
Krugman: Part of the Problem
October 29, 2003
Chris Floyd
Thieves
Like Us: Cheney's Backdoor to Halliburton
Robert Fisk
Iraq Guerrillas Adopt a New Strategy: Copy the Americans
Rick Giombetti
Let
Them Eat Prozac: an Interview with David Healy
The Intelligence Squad
Dark
Forces? The Military Steps Up Recruiting of Blacks
Elaine Cassel
Prosecutors
as Therapists, Phantoms as Terrorists
Marie Trigona
Argentina's War on the Unemployed Workers Movement
Gary Leupp
Every
Day, One KIA: On the Iraq War Casualty Figures
October 28, 2003
Rich Gibson
The
Politics of an Inferno: Notes on Hellfire 2003
Uri Avnery
Incident
in Gaza
Diane Christian
Wishing
Death
Robert Fisk
Eyewitness
in Iraq: "They're Getting Better"
Toni Solo
Authentic Americans and John Negroponte
Jason Leopold
Halliburton in Iran
Shrireen Parsons
When T-shirts are Verboten
Chris White
9/11
in Context: a Marine Veteran's Perspective
October 27,
2003
William A. Cook
Ministers
of War: Criminals of the Cloth
David Lindorff
The
Times, Dupes and the Pulitzer
Elaine Cassel
Antonin
Scalia's Contemptus Mundi
Robert Fisk
Occupational Schizophrenia
John Chuckman
Banging Your Head into Walls
Seth Sandronsky
Snoops R Us
Bill Kauffman
George
Bush, the Anti-Family President
October 25 / 26,
2003
Robert Pollin
The
US Economy: Another Path is Possible
Jeffrey St. Clair
Outsourcing US Guided Missile Technology to China
James Bunn
Plotting
Pre-emptive Strikes
Saul Landau
Should Limbaugh Do Time?
Ted Honderich
Palestinian Terrorism, Morality & Germany
Thomas Nagy
Saving the Army of Peace
Christopher Brauchli
Between Bush and a Lobotomy: Killing Endangered Species for Profit
Laura Carlsen
Latin America's Archives of Terror
Diane Christian
Evil Acts & Evil Actors
Muqtedar Khan
Lessons from the Imperial Adventure in Iraq
John Feffer
The Tug of War on the Korea Peninsula
Brian Cloughley
Iraq War Memories are Made of Lies
Benjamin Dangl
and Kathryn Ledebur
An Uneasy Peace in Bolivia
Karyn Strickler
Down
with Big Brother's Spying Eyes
Noah Leavitt
Legal Globalization
John Stanton
Hitler's Ghost Haunts America
Mickey Z.
War of the Words
Adam Engel
Tractatus Ridiculous
Poets' Basement
Curtis, Subiet and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Project Last Stand
October 24, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Ashcroft's
War on Greenpeace
Lenni Brenner
The Demographics of American Jews
Jeffrey St. Clair
Rockets,
Napalm, Torpedoes and Lies: the Attack on the USS Liberty Revisited
Sarah Weir
Cover-up of the Israeli Attack on the US Liberty
David Krieger
WMD Found in DC: Bush is the Button
Mohammed Hakki
It's Palestine, Stupid!: Americans and the Middle East
Harry Browne
Northern
Ireland: the Agreement that Wasn't
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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November
14 / 23, 2003
Recount in the Forests
Bush
Puts Out a Contract on the Spotted Owl
By JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
Every summer for the past ten years young biologists
head off into the forests of the Pacific Northwest to call spotted
owls. Every year they get fewer and fewer responses. The spotted
owl, which thrives only in the oldest of forests, is in a downward
spiral toward extinction. Take the rainforests of Washington's
Olympic peninsula. There the owls, isolated in a desert of clearcuts
and sprawl, are rapidly disappearing. According to the most recent
surveys, these Olympic peninsula owls have declined by more than
half in the last decade alone. At this rate the secretive bird
may well become extinct by 2010.
In the Cascade Range of western Washington
and Oregon, the owls, jeopardized by continued logging on private
and federal forest lands, aren't doing any better. Populations
are plummeting at a rate of 5 to 8 percent every year. Give the
owl in those tattered mountains another 25 years at most, unless
all logging stops.
So the numbers just aren't adding up
right for Bush, who promised the timber industry that he would
reinvigorate logging across the owl's habitat. As it now stands,
the Bush administration has produced far less timber for its
clients than did the Clinton administration. The natives are
getting restless.
With the numbers stacked against them,
the Bush team has attacked the counters. Sound familiar? Remember
Palm Beach County? The Bush crowd now echoes one of the most
paranoid accusations of big timber: that the Fish and Wildlife
Service is intentionally undercounting the owl population in
order to suppress
logging on federal lands in the Pacific Northwest. The Fish and
Wildlife Service, the Bush flacks charge, is too biased in favor
of protecting...you guessed it...wildlife. This must come as
a shock to both environmental groups and the agency, which is
facing dozens of lawsuits for not moving fast enough to protect
a slate of vanishing species, from the gray wolf and grizzly
to the northern goshawk and bull trout.
So for the first time ever, the Bush
administration hired private firms to assess the status of two
bird species threatened by logging in the northwest: the spotted
owl and the marbled murrelet. The spotted owl was listed as threatened
under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 and the murrelet, a
small sea-bird that nests in ancient coastal forests, in 1992.
The two private firms will be paid about
$800,000 for the biological reviews of the status of the birds.
These aren't just any private consulting firms, either. Both
have sturdy financial ties to the timber industry. The status
of spotted owl will be reviewed by the Sustainable Ecosystems
Institute. Last year alone, the institute received more than
$270,000 from Pacific Lumber_roughly 44 percent of its total
revenue. Pacific Lumber, corporate molester of the redwoods of
northern California, hired Sustainable Ecosystems to review of
the status of the marbled murrelet on company-owned lands of
redwood forest in Humboldt and Mendocino counties. Pacific Lumber
isn't its only client in big timber. Sustainable Ecosystems also
received money from Boise Cascade, Weyerhaeuser, Potlatch and
Rayonier. The firm's website refers to these timber giants warmly
as "sponsors and partners."
The genus behind this scheme to privatize
the spotted owl recount is Mark Rey, the Paul Wolfowitz of the
chainsaw brigades. Rey, once the most feared timber industry
lobbyist on the Hill, is now deputy secretary of agriculture
overseeing the Forest Service. He has been at war against the
owl and its defenders for 20 years: orchestrating numerous industry
lawsuits, directing campaign contributions to pro-timber legislators,
drafting legislation that exempted logging in owl habitat from
compliance with environmental laws.
The owl recount resulted from a 2002
lawsuit that Rey helped concoct with his former clients at the
American Forest Resource Council and the Western Council of Industrial
Workers, a union under the thumb of the bosses of big timber.
In early 2001, the Bush administration
ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to halt status reviews
of owl and murrelet populations, which are required every five
years by the Endangered Species Act. The administration claimed
poverty_it simply didn't have enough money to conduct a proper
evaluation. Then Rey urged his cohorts in the timber industry
to sue the government to compel the review. The industry sued
and won. It was a calculated gamble. To get more than a trickle
of timber flowing from federal forests, the industry needs the
owl delisted. But the population trends all point down. Thus,
there was the risk that an unbiased review by the Fish and Wildlife
Service might lead to the owl being upgraded to an endangered
species, greatly expanding restrictions on logging, roadbuilding
and other developments across the region_even on private land.
That's when Rey floated the scheme of
taking the reviews from the hands of the Fish and Wildlife Service
and giving it to a private outfit with ties to the timber industry.
Big timber pins its hopes on two factors that certainly wouldn't
survive scrutiny by biologists at the Fish and Wildlife Service.
First, it wants to introduce owl surveys conducted by the industry
purporting to show a thriving population of young owls in cut-over
forests in Oregon and northern California, surveys widely regarded
as junk science by most ecologists. Second, the industry desperately
wants the population of the California spotted owl (a distinct
species inhabiting the Sierra Nevada range) to be double counted
as part of the northern spotted owl population. Seen one owl,
seen them all.
The private review team will be headed
by discredited forest ecologist Jerry Franklin. Franklin, once
the dean of Forest Service researchers, cashed in his reputation
during the 1990s for a position at the University of Washington
school of forestry, a program lavishly underwritten by Weyerhaeuser.
He was later called upon by Clinton to head up the team that
developed the infamous Option 9 plan for northwest forests, which
legitimized continued logging in spotted owl habitat. The decline
of the owl has been steeper under Franklin's plan than it was
during the logging frenzy of the Reagan and Bush I years. Fresh
from this triumph, Franklin began to hire himself out as a consultant
to any timber company that would have him.
Like David Kay and his band of weapons
hunters in Iraq, Franklin and the Bush owl mercenaries will scour
the forests of the Northwest for birds that simply aren't there.
If Franklin produces a report suggesting that the owl population
has miraculously rebounded, he and his team will almost certainly
have cooked the books.
All this is part and parcel of a larger
Bush project to privatize the work of natural resource agencies,
from Park Service interpreters to firefighters. The move serves
cherished objectives of the corporate cabal now running the White
House: neuter the agencies, break the power of the federal employees
union and transfer crucial work to compliant outside contractors.
These contracts, often handed out to political patrons of the
Bush crowd, come with an unwritten codicil: produce the results
the administration wants or risk losing future deals. You're
either with us or against us. It won't take long for that lesson
to be drilled home.
It could have been different. In 1990,
the spotted owl won a chance at survival when federal ( and Reagan-appointed)
judge William Dwyer, slapped an injunction on all logging in
the owl's habitat. It was a courageous decision that prompted
a freshet of death threats. Dwyer shrugged them off. The enviros
largely cowered and finally caved when confronted with political
blackmail by Clinton. They relinquished the hard-won injunction
and sanctioned Jerry Franklin's logging plan, which condemned
the owl to smaller and smaller micro-reserves of forest that
served as little more than a kind of ecological death row.
Then big greens, now foraging for grants
on salmon and the boondoggle of "restoration forestry",
turned their back on the spotted owl, once their totemic species.
To continue to press for protection of the owl and its habitat
would have meant an aggressive confrontation with Clinton and
Bruce Babbitt. And they wanted none of that. "We haven't
actively focused on the spotted owl in several years," says
Heath Packard of the National Audubon Society. This is a damning
admission given that the Audubon Society had raised millions
on behalf of the owl and stood mute as the bird slid toward statistical
death, a slow motion extinction.
So after two decades of fierce warfare
in the forests of the Pacific Northwest the spotted owl and dozens
of other species that cling to the last of the old growth forests
appear doomed. Bush will get the blame, but the fingerprints
on the death warrant are decidedly bi-partisan
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 8 / 9, 2003
Kathleen and Bill Christison
Zionism
as Racist Ideology
Gabriel Kolko
Intelligence
for What?
The Vietnam War Reconsidered
Saul Landau
The
Bride Wore Black: the Policy Nuptials of Boykin and Wolfowitz
Brian Cloughley
Speeding Up to Nowhere: Training the New Iraqi Police
William Blum
The Anti-Empire Report:
A Permanent Occupation?
David Lindorff
A New Kind of Dancing in Iraq: from Occupation to Guerrilla War
Elaine Cassel
Bush's War on Non-Citizens
Tim Wise
Persecuting the Truth: Claims of Christian Victimization Ring
Hollow
Toni Solo
Robert Zoellick and "Wise Blood"
Michael Donnelly
Will the Real Ron Wyden Please Stand Up?
Mark Hand
Building a Vanguard Movement: a Review of Stan Goff's Full Spectrum
Disorder
Norman Solomon
War, Social Justice, Media and Democracy
Norman Madarasz
American Neocons and the Jerusalem Post
Adam Engel
Raising JonBenet
Dave Zirin
An Interview with George Foreman
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Albert and Greeder
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