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Today's
Stories
December 20 / 21, 2003
Kurt Nimmo
Bush
Gets Serious About Killing Iraqis
December 19, 2003
Elaine Cassel
Courts
Rebuke Bush for Trampling the Constitution
Robert Fisk
Raid
on Fantasyville: Shooting Samarra's Schoolboys in the Back
Zoltan Grossman
The
Occupation Has Failed to "Capture" the Loyalty of Iraqis
Mike Whitney
Bush's
Afghan Highway to Nowhere
Harold Gould
Has the Radical Arab Strategy Really Worked?
Gary Leupp
The
Neocon's Dream Memo
December 18, 2003
Ann Harrison
A
Landmark Victory for Medical Pot
John L. Hess
Catfish
Blues: The SOB's from Out of Town
Karyn Strickler
Ebola
is Good for You!
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Duryodhana
Dies
Harry Browne
Hail
Jim Hickey, the "Irish Hero" of the Colonial Occupation
of Iraq
Hammond Guthrie
Captured in Abasement
December 17, 2003
Robert Fisk
Saddam's
Cold Comforts
Gideon Levy
"Don't
Even Think About the Children"
Marjorie Cohn
The Fortuitous
Arrest of Saddam: a Pyrrhic Victory?
Andrew Cockburn
Saddam's
Last Act
December 16, 2003
Robert Fisk
Getting
Saddam...15 Years Too Late
Mahajan / Jensen
Saddam
in Irons: The Hard Truths Remain
John Halle
Matt
Gonzalez and Me
Josh Frank
The
Democrats and Saddam
Tariq Ali
Saddam
on Parade: the New Model of Imperialism
December 15, 2003
Robert Fisk
The Capture
of Saddam Won't Stop the Guerrilla War
Dave Lindorff
The
Saddam Dilemma
Abu Spinoza
Blowback on the Stand: The Trial of Saddam Hussein
Norman Solomon
For
Telling the Truth: the Strange Case of Katharine Gun
Patrick Cockburn
The
Capture of Saddam
Stew Albert
Joy to the World
December 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
December 12, 2003
Josh Frank
Halliburton,
Timber and Dean
Chris Floyd
The
Inhuman Stain
Dave Lindorff
Infanticide
as Liberation: Hiding the Dead Babies
Benjamin Dangl
Another Two Worlds Are Possible?
Jean-Paul Barrois
Two States or One? an Interview with Sami Al-Deeb on the Geneva
Accords
David Vest
Bush
Drops the Mask: They Died for Halliburton
December 11, 2003
Siegfried Sassoon
A
Soldier's Declaration Against War
Douglas Valentine
Preemptive
Manhunting: the CIA's New Assassination Program
John Chuckman
The Parable of Samarra
Peter Phillips
US Hypocrisy on War Crimes: Corp Media Goes Along for the Ride
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.
|
Weekend
Edition
December 20 / 21, 2003
Our Ass and Saddam's
Hole
On
Digging a Hole and Crawling in It
By DAVID VEST
American troops found a guy who looked a lot like
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn hiding in a spider hole in Iraq.
The word "grotesque" means
"out of a cave."
"Good riddance," said an oddly
prescient G. W. Bush, employing the same phrase millions will
no doubt utter the day he leaves office. If he returns to his
ranch in Texas sooner rather than later, voters all over the
country will run through the streets wearing T-shirts emblazoned
with G.W.'s likeness over the words "We got him!"
Saddam may have looked like a displaced
Russian novelist on Thorazine, and why not? We are told he spent
his last days in power putting the finishing touches on a new
novel about himself leading an underground resistance movement
to victory against an occupying force.
Forget Solzhenitsyn, Saddam is straight
out of Nabokov, who knew more about the psychology of the self-deluding
fool than anyone (with the possible exception of Henry James).
Go and rent Fassbinder's 1979 film of Nabokov's "Despair"
and let Dirk Bogarde explain the likes of Saddam to you without
of course ever mentioning him.
No one will ever mistake G. W. for a
novelist, nor is he much of an actor. Indeed, no president has
had less to say and more trouble saying it. He has dared come
forth from his own hiding place to confront the press only four
times this year. Bush,  who
overwhelmed a crumbling, virtually defenseless opponent only
to begin behaving as though he had just won the War of the Worlds,
was wearing no disguise when last seen, not even a borrowed flight
suit. He looked exactly like himself as he smirked his way through
a press conference and a victory lap with Diane Sawyer.
While G. W. witlessly gloated ("when
the heat got on, you dug yourself a hole, and you crawled in
it"), others were scowling on his behalf. William Bennett,
the chain-smoking former drug czar and easily the most dishonest-looking
man in America, turned up on cable calling outright for Bush
to torture Saddam, put sharp sticks under his fingernails, and
so forth, until he comes up with weapons of mass destruction.
(If they really wanted to torture Saddam they would force him
to read The Book of Virtues.)
So what if Saddam is getting no better
than what he had coming to him. I'm more worried about what we'll
all get, down the road, as a result of the administration's actions.
Whether or not he is a prisoner of war,
Saddam is, or was, after all, a Head of State.
Is it inappropriate to ask how we would
want an American president to be treated if he or she were ever
to fall into enemy hands and be accused of crimes against humanity?
(I agree, it is unthinkable. Still, let
us think it.)
Would not Americans demand that even
the worst commander-in-chief be treated with respect, and not
a hair on that old gray head harmed?
Would we not also feel that however they
were treating our president, they were treating our country?
Twenty years ago Donald Rumsfeld was
photographed grinning and hugging his friend Saddam Hussein.
Now Rumsfeld's army is holding our former employee incommunicado
at an undisclosed location, interrogating him without witnesses.
Assuming that the arrangement is not, contrary to appearances,
designed more to keep him from telling what he knows than to
encourage him to unload, can information produced under those
circumstances have a shred of credibility?
One imagines Saddam sitting there, even
now, dreaming of Mars bars and salami and outlining his next
ghastly novel in his head, no longer able to distinguish his
life from his dissociated legend.
Meanwhile people with close ties to the
administration go on television and call for the prisoner to
be tortured. No one in authority is telling these people to shut
up. Why should they? Their leader has already expressed his preference
for the "ultimate" punishment.
It's pretty hard to get worked up about
humane treatment for Saddam Hussein. I'm not too worried about
it myself. Frankly, I don't care what happens to him.
However, here's the thing. If the worst
have no rights, neither do the best.
By his own testimony, G. W. Bush's favorite
philosopher is Jesus, who said "Do unto others as you would
have them do unto you." The Buddha said that, too. So did
Dr. John the Night Tripper ("what goes around comes around").
"You dug yourself a hole, and you
crawled in it." Words that Bush used to describe Saddam's
attempt to hide from capture. Words that sadly may also be used
one day to describe Bush's adventure in Iraq.
* * *
(Apologies to William Faulkner, who said
of Dreiser, "No writer ever had more to say, and more trouble
saying it." And thanks to "outfidel," who first
suggested Saddam's resemblance to Solzhenitsyn in a newsgroup
posting.)
David Vest
writes the Rebel Angel column for CounterPunch. He and his band,
The Willing Victims, just released a scorching new CD, Way
Down Here.
He can be reached at: davidvest@springmail.com
Visit his website at http://www.rebelangel.com
Weekend
Edition Features for Dec. 13 / 14, 2003
Bill and Kathleen Christison
Chickenhearts
at Notre Dame: the Pervasive Fear of Talking About the Israeli
Connection
Stan Goff
Jessica Lynch, Plural
Tariq Ali
The Same Old Racket in Iraq
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Map is not the Territory
Marty Bender / Stan Cox
Dr. Atkins vs. the Planet
Christopher Brauchli
Mercury Rising: the EPA's Presents to Industry
Gary Leupp
On Marriage in "Recorded History", an Open Letter to
Gov. Mitt Romney
Sasan Fayazmanesh
The Saga of Iran's Alleged WMD
Larry Everest
Saddam, Oil and Empire: Supply v. Demand
William S. Lind
How to Fight a 4th Generation War
Fran Shor
From Vietnam to Iraq: Counterinsurgency and Insurgency
Ron Jacobs
Child Abuse as Public Policy
Omar Barghouti
Relative Humanity and a Just Peace in the Middle East
Adam Engel
Pretty Damn Evil: an Interview with Ed Herman
Kristin Van Tassel
Breastfeeding Compromised
Ben Tripp
On Getting Stabbed
Susan Davis
"The Secret Lives of Dentists", a Review
Dave Zirin
Does Dylan Still Matter? an Interview with Mike Marqusee
Norman Madarasz
Searching for the Barbarians
Poets' Basement
Guthrie and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Dean on Race
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