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Today's
Stories
December 11, 2003
James M. Carter
The
Merchants of Blood: War Profiteering from Vietnam to Iraq
December 10, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
The
War According to Newt Gingrich
Pat Youngblood / Robert
Jensen
Workers
Rights are Human Rights
Jeff Guntzel
On Killing Children
CounterPunch Wire
Ashcroft Threatens to Subpoena Journalist's Notes in Stewart
Case
Dave Lindorff
Gore's
Judas Kiss
December 9, 2003
Michael Donnelly
A
Gentle Warrior Passes: Craig Beneville's Quiet Thunder
Chris White
A Glitch
in the Matrix: Where is East Timor Today?
Abu Spinoza
The Occupation Concertina: Pentagon Punishes Iraqis Israeli Style
Laura Carlsen
The FTAA: a Broken Consensus
Richard Trainor
Process and Profits: the California Bullet Train, Then and Now
Josh Frank
Politicians as Usual: Gore Dean and the Greens
Ron Jacobs
Remembering
John Lennon
December 8, 2003
Newton Garver
Bolivia
at a Crossroads
John Borowski
The
Fall of a Forest Defender: the Exemplary Life of Craig Beneville
William Blum
Anti-Empire
Report: Revised Inspirations for War
Tess Harper
When Christians Kill
Thom Rutledge
My Next Step
Carol Wolman, MD
Nuclear
Terror and Psychic Numbing
Michael Neumann
Ignatieff:
Apostle of He-manitariansim
Website of the Day
Bust Bob Novak
December 6 / 7, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
Got Santorum?
December 5, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
Bremer
of the Tigris
Jeremy Brecher
Amistad
Revisited at Guantanamo?
Norman Solomon
Dean
and the Corp Media Machine
Norman Madarasz
France
Starts Facing Up to Anti-Muslim Discrimination
Pablo Mukherjee
Afghanistan:
the Road Back
December 4, 2003
M. Junaid Alam
Image
and Reality: an Interview with Norman Finkelstein
Adam Engel
Republican
Chris Floyd
Naked Gun: Sex, Blood and the FBI
Adam Federman
The US Footprint in Central Asia
Gary Leupp
The
Fall of Shevardnadze
Guthrie / Albert
RIP Clark Kerr
December 3, 2003
Stan Goff
Feeling
More Secure Yet?: Bush, Security, Energy & Money
Joanne Mariner
Profit Margins and Mortality Rates
George Bisharat
Who Caused the Palestinian Diaspora?
Mickey Z.
Tear Down That Wal-Mart
John Stanton
Bush Post-2004: a Nightmare Scenario
Harry Browne
Shannon
Warport: "No More Business as Usual"
December 2, 2003
Matt Vidal
Denial
and Deception: Before and Beyond Iraqi Freedom
Benjamin Dangl
An Interview with Evo Morales on the Colonization of the Americas
Sam Bahour
Can It Ever Really End?
Norman Solomon
That
Pew Poll on "Trade" Doesn't Pass the Sniff Test
Josh Frank
Trade
War Fears
Andrew Cockburn
Tired,
Terrified, Trigger-Happy
December 1, 2003
Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Unholy
Alliances: Zionism, US Imperialism and Islamic Fundamentalism
Dave Lindorff
Bush's
Baghdad Pitstop: Memories of LBJ in Vietnam
Harry Browne
Democracy Delayed in Northern Ireland
Wayne Madsen
Wagging the Media
Herman Benson
The New Unity Partnership for Labor: Bureaucratizing to Organize?
Gilad Atzmon
About
"World Peace"
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy and Intelligence: Monstrous Messes
November 29 / 30, 2003
Peter Linebaugh
On
the Anniversary of the Death of Wolfe Tone
Gary Leupp
Politicizing War on Fox News: a Tale of Two Memos
Saul Landau
Lying and Cheating:
Bush's New Political Math
Michael Adler
Inside a Miami Jail: One Activist's Narrative
Anthony Arnove
"They Put the Lie to Their Own Propaganda": an Interview
with John Pilger
Greg Weiher
Why Bush Needs Osama and Saddam
Stephen Banko, III
A Soldier's Dream
Forrest Hylton
Empire and Revolution in Bolivia
Toni Solo
The "Free Trade" History Eraser
Ben Terrall
Don't Think Twice: Bush Does Bali
Standard Schaefer
Unions
are the Answer to Supermarkets Woes
Richard Trainor
The Political Economy of Earthquakes: a Journey Across the Bay
Bridge
Mark Gaffney
US Congress Does Israel's Bidding, Again
Adam Engel
The System Really Works
Dave Lindorff
They, the Jury: How the System Rigs the Jury Pool
Susan Davis
Framing the Friedmans
Neve Gordon
Arundhati Roy's Complaint for Peace
Mitchel Cohen
Thomas Jefferson and Slavery
Ben Tripp
Capture Me, Daddy
Poets' Basement
Kearney, Albert, Guthrie and Smith
November 28, 2003
William S. Lind
Worse Than Crimes
David Vest
Turkey
Potemkin
Robert Jensen / Sam Husseini
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks
Wayne Madsen
Wag
the Turkey
Harold Gould
Suicide as WMD? Emile Durkheim Revisited
Gabriel Kolko
Vietnam
and Iraq: Has the US Learned Anything?
South Asia Tribune
The Story
of the Most Important Pakistan Army General in His Own Words
Website of the Day
Bush Draft
November 27, 2003
Mitchel Cohen
Why
I Hate Thanksgiving
Jack Wilson
An
Account of One Soldier's War
Stefan Wray
In the Shadows of the School of the Americas
Al Krebs
Food as Corporate WMD
Jim Scharplaz
Going Up Against Big Food: Weeding Out the Small Farmer
Neve Gordon
Gays
Under Occupation: Help Save the Life of Fuad Moussa
November 26, 2003
Paul de Rooij
Amnesty
International: the Case of a Rape Foretold
Bruce Jackson
Media
and War: Bringing It All Back Home
Stew Albert
Perle's
Confession: That's Entertainment
Alexander Cockburn
Miami and London: Cops in Two Cities
David Orr
Miami Heat
Tom Crumpacker
Anarchists
on the Beach
Mokhiber / Weissman
Militarization in Miami
Derek Seidman
Naming the System: an Interview with Michael Yates
Kathy Kelly
Hogtied
and Abused at Ft. Benning
Website of the Day
Iraq Procurement
November 25, 2003
Linda S. Heard
We,
the Besieged: Western Powers Redefine Democracy
Diane Christian
Hocus
Pocus in the White House: Of Warriors and Liberators
Mark Engler
Miami's
Trade Troubles
David Lindorff
Ashcroft's
Cointelpro
Website of the Day
Young McCarthyites of Texas
November 24, 2003
Jeremy Scahill
The
Miami Model
Elaine Cassel
Gulag
Americana: You Can't Come Home Again
Ron Jacobs
Iraq
Now: Oh Good, Then the War's Over?
Alexander Cockburn
Rupert Murdoch: Global Tyrant
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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December
11, 2003
Preemptive Manhunting
The
CIA's New Assassination Program
By DOUGLAS VALENTINE
The major media outlets have ignored the CIA's
on-going strategy of mass assassinations as one of the main weapons
in Bush's burgeoning global war of terror. This is why it came
as something of a shock to highbrows and media elites when Seymour
Hersh, in a recent article for The New Yorker, revealed
the existence of what he wrongfully referred to as "a new
Special Forces operation" that is intended to assassinate
the people comprising "the broad middle of the Ba'athist
underground."
This is a half-truth at best. To begin
with, this is a CIA assassination program, not a Special Forces
program; and while Hersh is correct when he says the targets
are members of the outlawed Ba'ath Party, he tactfully skirts
the fact that this assassination program is illegal because it
targets civilians not soldiers. Americans have denied these Iraqui
civilians due process in their own country. Based on the word
of a single anonymous informant, Ba'ath Party members who have
never harmed a single American can be detained indefinitely,
tortured until they rat out some colleagres, or become a double
agent, or they can be assassinated along with their family, friends
and neighbors.
And not just Ba'ath Party members, but
anyone who gets their name on the CIA's blacklist of political
and ideological enemies.
Preemptive Manhunting:
The New Phoenix Program
The CIA has concocted various euphemisms
for its long-standing policy of assassinating civilians whose
ideas and political beliefs it hates. In a 24 July 2003 article
for CounterPunch titled Nation
of Assassins, I listed some of them: "targetted kill"
being the most popular, along with neutralize and "executive
action". I've been waiting for the new euphemism with which
the media will assuage the public and now we have it from disinformation
specialist Seymour Hersh: "Preemptive Manhunting."
Preemptive Manhunting is the new name
for assassination and, according to Hersh (quoting one of his
usual anonymous sources), the rationale for resorting to this
immoral and illegal measure is that "The only way we can
win is to go  unconventional. We're going
to have to play their game. Guerrilla versus guerrilla. Terrorism
versus terrorism. We've got to scare the Iraqis into submission."
This is a textbook description of "selective
terrorism" as the ultimate form of psychological warfare,
and Hersh is correct in describing Preemptive Manhunting as the
rebirth of the CIA's Phoenix Program in South Vietnam.
For those who are unaware of it, a typical
Phoenix Program operation occurred in February 1968, when former
Senator Bob Kerrey (now added to the 9/11 Investigation team)
led a seven-member Navy SEAL team into Thanh Phong village and
murdered more than a dozen women and children--a war crime for
which Kerry received a Bronze Star. That's right--Kerrey lied
when he got back to camp and reported that he and his boys had
killed 21 Viet Cong guerrillas. We can expect a lot of this in
Iraq, Afghanistan, and any other place Bush sends the CIA to
terrorize the civilian populoation into submission.
In Vietnam, Kerrey & Company were
supposedly after the local Communist Party District Chief. Like
the Ba'ath Party in Iraq, the Communist Party was outlawed in
South Vietnan, thus providing the CIA with the pretext it needed
to kill its members. A Vietnamese informant provioded the intelligence
that Kerrey based his mission on, and, in Iraq, the CIA's Phoenix
assassination teams will rely on paid, anonymous Iraqi informants
to identify which Ba'ath Party members will be murdered along
with all their family, friends, and neighbors. And anyone else
the CIA wants killed.
That's right--terrorizing the people
into submission is the point of Preemptive Manhunting, just as
it was the point of the CIA's Phoenix Program. As in Kerrey's
operation in Thanh Phong, that means killing anyone in any way
related to the target. Hundreds of My Lai massacres occurred
in South Vietnam in the name of Phoenix, and starting in Afghanistan
and Iraq, the CIA will perpetrate a hundred times that many massacres
around the world, in the name of George Bush, Ariel Sharon, and
the Judaeo-Christian God.
One final note. Hersh mentions that Israel
is guiding the CIA's Phoenix Program in Iraq, and as everyone
knows, the Israelis are the world's masters of assassination
and terrorizing an entire people into submission. What Hersh
doesn't mention is that the blanket of censorship that prevents
the American media from criticizing Israel for its war crimes
has now been cast over Bush and the CIA, and all the people they
use to conquer foreigns nations and assassinate people who never
did any American any harm--until the Americans invaded their
country.
Compare America's conquest of Iraq with
Israeli's conquest of Palestine, and you begin to understand.
In each case the stragey is massive war crimes on the one hand,
and targetted kills of inspirational leaders on the other. This
devastating one-two punch is easier through the complicity of
the corporate media.
In this respect both Hersh and The New
Yorker serve as essential instruments of the Big Lie that makes
Preemptive Manhunting popular and thus possible. His story in
The New Yorker was no mistake, but merely a part of the psychological
warfare campaign being waged by the Bush regime to subdue the
resistance of the American public to this awful war.
Douglas Valentine is the author of The
Hotel Tacloban, The
Phoenix Program, and TDY.
His fourth book, The Strength of the Wolf: The Federal Bureau
of Narcotics, 1930-1968,
will be published in May 2004. His latest article, "Whose
Homeland Security", appeared in the July 2003 issue of Penthouse
Magazine.
For information about Mr. Valentine,
and his books and articles, please visit his web sites at www.DouglasValentine.com
and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine
Weekend
Edition Features for Nov. 29 / 30, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
The
UN: Should Be Late; Never Was Great
CounterPunch Special
Toronto Globe and Mail Kills Review of "The Politics of
Anti-Semitism"
Vicente Navarro
Salvador Dali, Fascist
Saul Landau
"Reality
Media": Michael Jackson, Bush and Iraq
Ben Tripp
How Bush Can Still Win
Gary Leupp
On Purchasing Syrian Beer
Ron Jacobs
Are We Doing Body Counts, Now?
Larry Everest
Oil, Power and Empire
Lee Sustar
Defying the Police State in Miami
Jacob Levich
When NGOs Attack: Implications for the Coup in Georgia
Toni Solo
Game Playing by Free Trade Rules: the Results from Indonesia
and Dominican Republic
Mark Scaramella
How to Fix the World Bank
Bruce Anderson
The San Francisco Mayor's Race
Brian Cloughley
Shredding the Owner's Manual: the Hollow Charter of the UN
Adam Engel
A Conversation with Tim Wise
Neve Gordon
Fuad and Ezra: an Update on Gays Under the Occupation
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Gives "Freedom" Medal to Robert Bartley
Tom Stephens
Justice Takes a Holiday
Susan Davis
Avast, Me Hearties! a Review of Disney's "Pirates of the
Caribbean"
Jeffrey St. Clair
A
Natural Eye: the Photography of Brett Weston
Mickey Z.
Press Box Red
Poets' Basement
Greeder, Orloski, Albert
T-shirt of the Weekend
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