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June 14, 2002
Steve Perry
How the Bush Adminstration Buried
Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
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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How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
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
New Book at an
Amazing Discount!
Reviews of Gore:
a User's Manual
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June 14,
2002
The Fear Factor to Promote War
and Trample the Truth
by Tom Turnipseed
In egregious efforts to divert media attention
from relevant revelations of foreknowledge of the 9/11/01 attacks,
the Bush administration appears to be forcing the fear factor
on the American people. To counter the concerns produced by 9/11/01
and rapidly evolving "who knew what when" evidence,
the administration is seizing the headlines and lead stories
on television in a shameless show of constant and conveniently
contrived newspeak. Evidence is emerging from sources in South
Carolina that a unit of the South Carolina National Guard was
suddenly informed in July of 2001 to prepare for a mobilization
exercise to be held on September 14, 2001.
The most secretive administration in
United States' history has been relentlessly releasing fearful
warnings of new attacks to come, along with grandiose plans for
a humongous "homeland security" agency, with 170,000
employees and a $37 billion dollar budget, to be run out of the
White House. Rather than allow the public to learn about critical
information surrounding the events that led us into the "war
on terrorism", the arm-chair soldiers of the Bush administration
are selling the fear factor to cover their butts and launch the
United States into a "first strike" war with Iraq.
People are coming forward with alarming accounts of activities
that beg us to answer the question of "who knew what when",
but such reports are being deliberately diminished in news coverage
by the Bush propaganda machine as it usurps the truth from the
public.
After reading an article I wrote last
week titled "A Crisis of Confidence In U.S. Leadership"
a former member of the 1/118th Infantry Battalion of the South
Carolina National Guard told me: "My unit reported for drill
in July 2001 and we were suddenly and unexpectedly informed that
all activities planned for the next two months would be suspended
in order to prepare for a mobilization exercise to be held on
September 14, 2001. We worked diligently for two weekends and
even came in on an unscheduled day in August to prepare for the
exercise. By the end of August all we needed was a phone call,
which we were told to expect, and we could hop into a fully prepared
convoy with our bags and equipment packed." Such indicators
of a coming crisis before 9/11/01 are increasing.
After meeting in closed sessions, Congressional
investigators like Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob
Graham, D-Fla. report they are getting "significant numbers
of people" from inside the government with more information
about intelligence failures relating to the 9/11/01 terrorists
attacks. Alabama Senator Richard Shelby, who is the senior Republican
on the Committee, said that intelligence failures had now reached
into the super-secret National Security Agency. The comments
of the Senators were buried on the inner pages of newspapers
by the latest headline-grabbing White-House-generated-terror-scare.
The terror warriors at the White House seized the headlines on
June 9 and 10, 2002 with a frightening story about a terrorist
arrested back on May 8, 2002 in Chicago, who was said to be involved
in a "dirty bomb, nuclear attack" plan against targets
in the United States.
The alleged nuclear threat has dominated
the news for most of the week and has raised the U.S. public's
fear factor and "us against them" war mentality to
the max. This imminent nuclear peril was supposedly based on
information gathered from al-Qaeda-Deep-Throat, Abu Zubaydah,
a mysterious former associate of Osama bin Laden who was captured
in March in Pakistan and is being held incommunicado at an "undisclosed,
heavily guarded" location where he has been interrogated
in "100 sessions" by U.S. intelligence. The would-be
dirty-bomb detonator is an Hispanic American named Jose Padilla
who converted to the Islamic faith as a prisoner and is now known
as Abdullah al-Muhajir.
Media outlets in the United Kingdom report
that British and European security officials are highly skeptical
of American claims that the alleged "dirty bomb" plotter
was preparing to unleash a radioactive attack and reporters in
the mainstream media in the United States have implied that the
threat was exaggerated as a diversionary tactic by the Bush administration.
Padilla is being held incommunicado and without benefit of counsel
at a military installation in Charleston, S.C. In a lead editorial
headlined "Dirty Bombs and Civil Rights", The New York
Times said that the "government's position is unacceptable"
because they are labeling an American citizen an "enemy
combatant" and are maintaining he is unable to challenge
his indefinite detention.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration has
backed off from Attorney General Ashcroft's statement on June
10 when he said, "We have disrupted an unfolding terrorist
plot to attack the United States by exploding a radioactive "dirty
bomb". Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz remarked
on June 11 that, "I don't think there was actually a plot
beyond some fairly loose talk and(al-Muhajir's) coming in here
to plan further deeds".
An inevitable target for the Bush administration's
continuing war on terror is Saddam Hussein. On June 10 Defense
Secretary Rumsfeld stopped by a U.S. military base in Kuwait
on Iraq's border to cheer-lead the troops about striking at the
sources of terror in Iraq. To better prepare us for the war against
Iraq , the next terror tale from Deep-Throat Zubayah might just
be that Jose Padilla spent the night in Saddam Hussein's palace
in Baghdad. A new invasion of Iraq could sweep questions about
9/11 even further under the rug and out of the news.
Demands for a far-reaching inquiry into
the mounting evidence of "who knew what when" by an
independent commission are being expressed by family members
of victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. On June 11, four busloads
of victim's family members went to Washington to lobby for such
a commission. Ellen Mariani of Derry, N.H., whose husband died
on the United flight that crashed into the south tower of the
world trade center said, " I want a real investigation.
I don't want lip service. I'm angry, and I'm not going away".
Tom Turnipseed
is an attorney, writer and political activist in Columbia, South
Carolina. http://www.turnipseed.net
Today's
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