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How a Tiny Alaskan Indian Tribe Got Billions in Pentagon Contracts by Jeffrey St. Clair; Dems and Dives by Alexander Cockburn; Spooky Grants: More on the CIA's Recruitment of Campus Professors by David Price. Remember these stories are available exclusively in the print edition of CounterPunch. CounterPunch Online is read by millions of viewers each month! But remember, we are funded solely by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this website by buying a subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation for the online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible. Click here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe Now! or write CounterPunch, PO BOX 228, Petrolia, CA 95558 |
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Other Lands Have Dreams: From Baghdad to Pekin Prison by KATHY KELLY  Today's Stories April 6, 2005 Cindy Ellen
Hill April 5, 2005 Jim Connolly Paul Craig
Roberts Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Ron Jacobs Dan Smith Mark Engler Richard Oxman Greg Moses Website of the Day
April 4, 2005 Kevin Zeese Paul Craig Roberts Larry Birns
/ Sarah Schaffer Karyn Strickler Joshua Frank Michael Dickinson Surendra R.
Devkota Derrick O'Keefe Uri Avnery Website of the Day
April 2 / 3, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Jeffrey St. Clair Stan Goff John Ross Saul Landau Robert Creeley Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Greg Moses Fran Quigley Kurt Nimmo Nicole Colson Chris Genovali Alan Farago Lawrence Reichard Ben Tripp Avantika Regmi Lee Sustar Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff Poets' Basement Website of
the Day
April 1, 2005 Tom Barry Rahul Mahajan Charlie Cray
/ Jim Vallette Dave Lindorff Zeynep Toufe Suzan Mazur Michael Dickinson Stan Cox Ra Ravishankar Daniel Wolff
March 31, 2005 Sharon Smith Ron Jacobs Tariq Ali Michael Dickinson Kanak Mani
Dixit Mitchell Zimmerman Xuan-Trang
Ho Dave Zirin Joe Bageant Jeff Halper Website of
the Day
March 30, 2005 Gary Leupp Ralph Nader
/ Kevin Zeese Chase Madar Toni Solo Jackie Corr Ahmad Faruqui Mike Roselle Jude Wanniski Francis A.
Boyle Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of
the Day
March 29, 2005 Ralph Nader Gary Leupp Sonia Cardenas Stew Albert Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Carl G. Estabrook
March 28, 2005 Jeremy Scahill Sonali Kolhatkar Sasha Kramer Kevin Zeese Tom Stephens Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Newton Garver Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
March 26 / 27, 2005 Gary Leupp Peter Linebaugh Marc Robert Laura Carlsen Saul Landau
/ Puja Patel Dave Foreman Fred Gardner Jennifer Matsui Dave Lindorff Dharma Adhikari Joshua Frank Patrick Barr Christopher
Brauchli Ramzy Baroud Jackie Corr Ben Tripp Dr. Susan Block Mickey Z. Justin Taylor Richard Joseph Poets' Basement
March 25, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons Yoshie Furuhashi Pat Williams Mark Engler Rahul Mahajan Lance Selfa Ralph Nader John R. Llewellyn Jo Guldi
March 24, 2005 Joshua Frank Talli Nauman Martin Espada Dave Lindorff Elaine Cassel Jack McCarthy Jack Random Barbara Ferguson Suzan Mazur Dorreen Yellow Bird Andrew Wimmer
and Mark Chmiel
Patrick Bond Mike Whitney Becky White Michael Donnelly Niranjan Ramakrishnan Ashley Smith David Swanson Derrick O'Keefe Paul A. Moore Dalton Walker Patrick Cockburn
March 22, 2005 William Blum Jim Vallette Greg Moses John Farley Ron Jacobs M. Junaid Alam Rep. Cynthia
McKinney Dave Lindorff James Petras
March 21, 2005 John Walsh Werther Mike Stark David Swanson James T. Phillips Mike Ferner Robert Jensen Paul Craig
Roberts Stew Albert Website of
the Day
March 19, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Tom Reeves Saul Landau Alan Maass Ron Jacobs David Green John Blair Steve Greenfield Ben Tripp Mike Roselle Joshua Frank Mark Weisbrot Dave Lindorff Sarah Schaffer Warren Hastings Poets' Basement
March 18, 2005 Dave Zirin Richard Thieme John Walsh David Swanson Ben Terrall David Boyle Dorreen Yellow Bird Mokhiber /
Weissman Greg Moses Website of
the Day
March 17, 2005 Christopher
Brauchli Bill Quigley Brian Cloughley Gary Bass / Adam Hughes Dave Lindorff Jude Wanniski Alexander Billet John Ross Website of the Day
March 16, 2005 Ralph Nader William Cook Kevin Zeese Jackie Corr Alan Maass David R. Kolker Cindy Ellen
Hill Paul Craig
Roberts
March 15, 2005 Gary Leupp Dave Lindorff Greg Moses Hadas Their
/ Katrina Yeaw Alison Weir Matt Koehler Evelyn Pringle Harry Browne
March 14, 2005 Ralph Nader David Miller Stan Cox Mike Roselle David Swanson Simona Sharoni Dave Lindorff Dorreen Yellow Bird Tom Barry Website of the Day
March 12 / 13, 2005 David H. Price Noam Chomsky Laura Carlsen Stan Goff Valentina Nicoli Michael Leonardi Saul Landau
/ Sarah Anderson Joe Bageant Manuel García,
Jr. Greg Moses James J. Brittain Ben Tripp Joshua Frank Fred Gardner Walter Brasch Ramzy Baroud Christopher
Brauchli Michael Donnelly Ron Jacobs Richard Oxman Poets' Basement
March 11, 2005 Jerry Fresia Ron Jacobs Dave Lindorff William James
Martin Muqtedar Khan Kathryn Ledebur Mike Whitney Dave Zirin Website of the Day
March 10, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts John Marc Leas, Colleen McLaughlin
and Ashley Smith Larry Birns Michael Donnelly Luis Gomez Jackie Corr Uri Avnery Website of the Day
March 9, 2005 Jeffrey St.
Clair Ward Churchill Robert Fisk Bernice Powell Jackson Mickey Z. Dave Zirin Michael Donnelly James Reiss Vijay Prashad
March 8, 2005 Paul Craig
Roberts Robert Fisk Kurt Nimmo Suzan Mazur Evelyn Pringle Giuliana Sgrena Elaine Cassel
March 7, 2005 Dave Zirin Brian Cloughley John Chuckman Mike Whitney Mark Weisbrot Fred Gardner Richard Neville Uri Avnery
March 5 / 6, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Gary Leupp Ron Jacobs Tom Reeves Jenna Orkin Tom Barry Joshua Frank Moshe Adler Jane Stillwater Omar Barghouti / Jacqueline
Sfeir Christopher
Brauchli John Pilger Raúl
Zibechi David Krieger Three Takes on Nepal Surendra R. Devkota Bhishma Karki Joseph Pietri Ben Tripp Poets' Basement Website of
the Weekend
March 4, 2005 Frederick Hudson
March 3, 2005 Pat Williams Brian Cloughley Dave Lindorff Amira Hass Greg Moses Lynne Landes Nelson P. Valdés John Ross
March 2, 2005 Saul Landau
/ Farrah Hassen Mike Roselle M. Junaid Alam Suzan Mazur Jackson Thoreau Michael Donnelly Jeffrey St.
Clair Website of the Day
March 1, 2005 Scott Richard
Lyons David Lindorff Patrick Cockburn
/ David Enders Ron Jacobs Tanya Garcia Joseph Pietri Kona Lowell Paul Craig
Roberts Website of
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Hot Stories Alexander Cockburn Subcomandante
Marcos Norman Finkelstein Steve Niva Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams Steve
J.B. Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber Wendell
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April 6, 2005 Bush's LegacyDead Bodies, Dead Wrong, Dead LogicBy MATT VIDAL Madison, Wisconsin The United States is a deeply fractured polity. The US has always had significant political, economic and social divisions throughout its short history. Yet just as a diversity of political ideologies have been obfuscated by an electoral system dominated by two parties, deep schisms have, over the last few generations, been largely contained and managed by the civil religion of Americanism underwritten by the post-war prosperity that created a middle class. The hope and possibility of improving one's lot through hard work has kept the underlying divisions in the US from festering too severely. But the middle class is now under attack from two sides: First, from corporate America, as epitomized by Wal-Mart whose "everyday low prices" are subsidized by government assistance provided to its hard-working employees, who earn poverty wages with insufficient benefits [1]; Second, from a strange new brand of so-called conservatives who have reduced the social safety net at time of great economic insecurity, while greatly expanding the size and scope of the government, leaving record-breaking budget deficits for generations to come. George W. Bush has led the neoconservatives to a quite impressive number of unprecedented victories, in the process bringing to the surface and crystallizing America's profound disharmony. While it is most likely too early to give any sort of final assessment on Bush's legacy the damage isn't done I submit the following for the record. With the recent release of the final report of Bush's "Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction," we have an authoritative, definitive answer: the Bush administration, which has displayed consistency to the point of irresponsibility in emphasizing alleged WMD's as its major justification for attacking Iraq, was "dead wrong." Of course, the report's authors were careful to stick to their mandate, which authorized them only to blame the intelligence community and not to investigate how the "intelligence" was used or influenced by policy makers. But what should be clear to anyone paying attention was quietly acknowledged in the report: "the river of intelligence that flowed from the CIA to top policymakers seemed to be 'selling' intelligence in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested." The White House got what it wanted. Not only was the Bush administration dead wrong, but the actions they justified with this information have directly resulted in up to, and possibly more than 20,000 dead bodies: over 1,700 soldiers from the US-led coalition forces and between 17,000 and 20,000 Iraqi civilians. But perhaps more remarkable than anything is that these and other facts have done nothing to diminish Bush's support among the American public. Indeed, it may be Bush's crowning achievement that reason has ceased to be an effective component of political discourse in the US. Rather, appeals to emotion (fortified by lies, half-truths and image management) have become the primary form of persuasion in American politics.[2] In the wake of Bush's political tsunami, logic must be counted among the dead. Rational argument, along with accountability, has become as quaint as the Geneva Conventions. Yet, for those who can still be persuaded by reason, here are three important questions for which we can now contrast the Bush administration's initial claims with the eventual outcomes. (Again, I submit these for the record, though I do not expect that any facts will persuade any Bush supporters.)
Why did the US attack Iraq? On March 30, 2003, ten days after air strikes began and the first day that US marines and Army troops engaged the Iraqi Republican Guard, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld declared, "We know where the WMDs are." On May 29, 2003, just over
three weeks after Bush declared the official end of "major
combat operations" in Iraq, he continued the charade, asserting,
"We found the weapons of mass destruction."[3]
Predictably, Bush's response is to disavow the major conclusions of the report and promise more of the same: "Our collection and analysis of intelligence will never be perfect, but in an age where our margin for error is getting smaller, in an age in which we are at war, the consequences of underestimating a threat could be tens of thousands of innocent lives my administration will continue to make intelligence reforms that will allow us to identify threats before they fully emerge." Or, as it turns out, nonexistent threats. "It turns out we were all wrong," said Bush's chief weapons inspector David Kay in a January 28, 2004 testimony to Congress, "there were no large stockpiles of WMD." But we weren't all wrong. Many on the left had questioned the politicized intelligence from the beginning, arguing the whole time that Iraq had no connection to 9/11 or Al Qaeda, that the shift in focus from bin Laden to Hussein was the result of a previously-formed administration plan to go after Iraq rather than the outcome of a sustained focus in the so-called war on terror, and that any threat from Hussein was unlikely and certainly not immanent. Indeed, the pages of the Counterpunch website were filled with such pleas to reason. For instance, three weeks before the invasion of Iraq began, I wrote on Counterpunch.org: "Clinton's Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, told incoming President Bush that 'Iraq no longer poses a military threat to its neighbors.' More strikingly, in a report to congress right before the Joint Resolution on Iraq was passed, the CIA said that 'Baghdad for now appears to be drawing a line short of conducting terrorist attacks with conventional or chemical and biological weapons against the United States.'[4] But Bush's popular and congressional support was not based on logic or reason. Rather, the Bush administration had gotten its way through emotional appeals, exemplified by Condi's scare tactic: "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
What will the war entail and achieve? The three major architects of the war were Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz. Each played their role in selling the war:
Knowing what we know now, these comments are at best willfully optimistic. But, again, the current state of affairs in Iraq was predicted quite clearly by many opponents of the war before the invasion began. Indeed, looking again at the protestations written on Counterpunch's website, it is hard to interpret these comments as displaying anything other than the sheer incompetence of the war's architects and a triumph of ideology over reason. For example, in a series of articles on Counterpunch, Zoltan Grossman, a political geographer and expert in global ethnic relations, argued that US and coalition forces would face a resilient Shi'ite insurgency and predicted that Saddam's capture would intensify the insurgency.[5] Of the 1500 dead American soldiers, 1400 of them were killed in the two years since Bush declared "mission accomplished" in Iraq, and the occupation drags on. The situation in Iraq now is one of extreme economic and political instability and uncertainty. Electricity is available for only a small fraction of each day, food is in short supply and the sewage and sanitation systems are not operating.[6] Iraqis are being tortured by occupation forces in the same prisons used by Hussein. In general, chaos reigns: "As many as 5,000 Iraqis have been kidnapped in the last year and a half, according to Western and Iraqi security officials," the New York Times reports, most of them for ransom unrelated to political motivations.[7]
How will the war be financed? Finally, the question of the financial cost of the war must be added to the human cost. Former Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz, recently rewarded by Bush with a nomination to head the World Bank (and subsequently confirmed), told the House Committee on Appropriations at a Hearing on a Supplemental War Regulation on March 27, 2003: There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi peopleand on a rough recollection, the oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the course of the next two or three yearsWe're dealing with a country that can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon. Currently the US has spent over $200 billion since the invasion in March 2003 and the administration has recently asked for an additional $82 billion (outside the normal budget process). Again, if this displays anything other than sheer incompetence on the part of the administration's war architects, it is the triumph of belief and emotion over reason. When history proclaims its final verdict on Bush's legacy, it will likely be not the greatest intelligence "failure" of modern history, nor the tens of thousands of dead bodies left in his wake, but the ascendancy of emotion in American political discourse, as logic and reason are buried with so many other opponents of the neocon agenda. Matt Vidal is pursuing his doctorate at the University
of Wisconsin in Madison. He
can be reached at: mvidal@ssc.wisc.edu 1. Jenna Wright, "Wal-Mart Welfare: How taxpayers subsidize the world's largest retailer," Dollars and Sense January/February 2005. 2. Many readers will notice the classic philosophical distinction between types of rhetoric here: logos (reason) versus pathos (emotion). A third type of rhetoric in the classic distinction is ethos or appeal based on character. Bush politics are certainly focused on ethos too, through appeal to the moral character of conservatives and patriots, and through character assassination of opponents. It is only logos logic or reason that has been strangled by the ascendancy of Bush politics (somewhat like the use of decapitation as a 'new' tactic of terrorism that has resulted from Bush's foreign policy). 3. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/g8/interview5.html. 4. Matt Vidal, "George W. Bonaparte: The Renunciation of Leadership," Counterpunch.org, February 28, 2004. 5. Zoltan Grossman, "After the War on Saddam: A War on Iraqi Dissidents," Counterpunch.org, March 21, 2003; "The Perils of Occupation: The Easier the Victory, The Harder the Peace," Counterpunch.org, April 20, 2003. 6. Kevin Zeese, "After Two Years of Occupation: Both Iraq and the US are Worse Off," Counterpunch.org, March 16, 2005. 7. James Glanz, "Rings That Kidnap Iraqis Thrive on Big Threats and Bigger Profits," New York Times March 28, 2005. 8. Iraq Index, The Brookings
Institution, http://www.brookings.edu/iraqindex.
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