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June 17, 2002
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
June 15 / 16, 2002
Tanweer Akram
A Review
of Noam Chomsky's 9-11
Daniel Wolff
The Day
They Shot a Wolf in the Ghetto and What It Meant
Ralph Nader
A Corporate
Crime State
David Vest
Have You
Been Serviced?
Karl Kraus
A Minor
Detail
Alexander Cockburn
The
Terrorism of Everyday Life
June 14, 2002
Mark Weisbrot
US Trade
Policy:
"Do as We Say, Not as We Did"
Starhawk
The Boy Who Kissed the Soldier
David Krieger
Farewell
to the ABM Treaty
Tom Turnipseed
The Fear Factor to Promote
War and Trample Truth
Steve Perry
How the
Bush Adminstration Buried Coleen Rowley
June 13, 2002
Linda Belanger
Israeli-Palestinian
Conflict:
The Story Behind the Headlines
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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Published March 15, 2002
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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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Reviews of Gore:
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|
June 17,
2002
Taking on the
School of the Americas
Graduates from
Ft. Benning partook in Latin America's most corrupt regimes,
yet Congress still funds the school
by Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch
Since the tragedy of 9/11, we have learned some
of the ways Osama bin Laden has schooled his al-Qaida organization
into a formidable terrorist organization. No major media organization
I know of, however, dares today to discuss how for more than
five decades - the last two decades on our own soil - our own
government systematically has been operating a more substantial
terrorist school.
Established in Panama in 1946 as a hemispheric
Cold War beachhead, the U.S. Army School of the Americas (SOA),
which operates solely for the training of Latin American military
officers, was moved to Ft. Benning in Columbus, GA in 1984. Over
60,000 have graduated. They include Panamanian strongman Manuel
Noriega and Bolivian dictator Hugo Banzer; the assassins of an
archbishop, a bishop, six Jesuit priests and four American churchwomen;
and countless other military strongmen responsible for the deaths
of literally hundreds of thousands.
From 1989-93, I worked with and heard
the graphic persecution stories of untold numbers of Central
American refugees fleeing de facto military dictatorships. It
was no coincidence that the majority of SOA graduates in those
years hailed from the Central American countries of Guatemala
and El Salvador. Today, the majority of trainees are imported
from Colombia, where we have pumped over $2 million of military
aid daily the last two years into a "war on drugs"
smokescreen for business interests that has only served to inflame
the 40-year civil war there. Just two weeks ago, a narrow House
majority freed this "drug eradication" money to openly
engage in counterinsurgency operations. Vietnam, anyone?
In 1996 the Pentagon was forced to release
training manuals used at the school that advocated the use of
torture, extortion and execution, according to The School of
the America's Watch, a watchdog organization. Even after these
were made public, Defense officials continued to point out that
most of the school's graduates had not committed the scores of
human rights abuses against the millions of refugees fleeing
the wrath that's come. This may be true. At the same time, for
the last 55 years most of the Latin American military officers
who actually ordered these abuses learned their lessons well
through our taxpayer-supported SOA.
After the House of Representatives decisively
voted to shut down the school in 1999, a House-Senate conference
committee voted 8-7 to keep it open, provided the school be renamed
- get this - the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation
(WHISC). Even SOA proponents saw no difference in the much-touted
renaming.
Georgia's late Sen. Paul Coverdell assured
his constituents the name switch was "a cosmetic change,"
and the Columbus, Ga. Ledger-Inquirer strongly concurred in a
recent editorial. Different name - same shame. Orwellian Doublespeak,
anyone?
Please join me and numerous communions
such as the Presbyterian Church in urging leaders such as our
distinguished Sen. Carl Levin, Chair of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, to close SOA/WHISC and discontinue "Plan Colombia."
The irony again is that, in the midst of our current war on terrorism
to parts East, we train and unleash scores of future terrorists
yearly to parts South. Hypocrisy, anyone?
Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch is pastor of Northside Presbyterian Church in
Ann Arbor. He was one of 43 indicted in April for trespassing
onto Ft. Benning during what he describes as a solemn nonviolent
civil disobedience action last November. The "SOA 43"
trial date has been set for July 8 at the U.S. District Court
in Columbus, GA.
Today's
Features
Dave Marsh
Corporate
Buy Outs and the Decline of Teen Jive
Robert Jensen
Rhetoric
Distorts Realities
David Vest
Shut Up
and Clap
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