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April 10, 2002
Michael Neumann
Israelis and Indians
April 9, 2002
Bernard
Weiner
Colin
Powell's Table Talk
Matt Vidal
Thomas Friedman,
Another Wasted Pulitzer
Ron Jacobs
Buyer
Beware
Robert Jensen
I Helped Kill a Palestinian
Vijay
Prashad
Memories
of Barbarity:
Sharonism and September
Wayne Madsen
Anthrax and the Agency:
Thinking the Unthinkable
April 8, 2002
David
Vest
From
Birmingham to Nashville:
The Making of Tammy Wynette
Rick Giombetti
Paxil, Suicide and Science
Dr. Neve
Gordon
Letter
to an IDF Colonel:
How Did You Become
a War Criminal?
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's Top 10 CDs
Jordy
Cummings
Not
in My Name Anymore
Gavin Keeney
Bush and the Middle East:
Mouth Wide Shut
Edward
Said
The
Future of Palestine
April 7, 2002
Beth Daoud
Accompanying Ambulances
in Bethlehem
Nancy
Stohlman
After
the Invasion:
The Search for Bread
Among the Ruins
Thomas Mountain
"Yellow Peril" In Hawai'i:
Judge Orders Chains and Shackles for Chinese Witnesses
Tariq
Ali
Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?
April 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
War, Snake Oil and Circuses
Viktor
Litovkin
Russian
Generals Raise Questions About Pentagon Victories in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
CIA Survey of Iraqi Airfields
May Herald Attack
Walt Brasch
Oil
Slick George:
Bush-whacking the Environment
Ralph Nader
Campaign Finance Sham
Sam Bahour
The
Blind Leading the Criminal
Bill Christison:
A Former CIA Official on
Oil and the Middle East
April 5, 2002
Charmaine
Seitz
In
Ramallah: The Grueling Reoccupation Grinds On
Nancy Stohlman
The Invasion of Bethlehem
and Our Tax Dollars at Work
Beth Daoud
The
Siege of Bethlehem:
"What Do You Mean God Is Punishing Me?"
Fareed Marjaee:
Demonizing Iran
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Philip
Morris to Canada:
"Drop Dead"
Alex Lynch
Tampa Campus Mirrors
Middle East Strife
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
Resources:
100s of Links
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and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
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
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April 10, 2002
American Journal
From the West Bank, to Barbecue,
to Old Sparky and Beyond
By Alexander Cockburn
For those eagerly awaiting further uproar from
this writer on the unspeakable assaults on Palestinians on the
West Bank, the carnage in the camps, the siege of the Holy Church
of the Nativity by Sharon's troops, a word of warning: this column
contains reflections on barbecue, a subject that arouses even
more passion than matters affecting the peoples of what used
to be termed The Holy Land, so parental discretion is advised.
Onward.
Greer, South Carolina: On the road again.
This time the vehicle of choice is a 1985 Ford Escort station
wagon. Nothing much to look at but in the mid-1980s Ford put
4-cylinder Japanese diesel engines into a few of those Escorts
and this is one of them: 50 or 60 miles to the gallon, tight
gears and the feel of a sports car. I head off down the road
from Greenville SC towards Birmingham Alabama and my cell phone
rings. It's a fellow from the New Republic called Frank something-or-other,
who is eager to quiz me about some recent remarks of mine about
the internet being awash with anti-Israeli material.
Amid the crackle and hiss of the ether
and the roar of the interstate it's hard to hear Frank through
the no-hands speaker on my dashboard, but eventually I catch
his purpose, and ask him flatly, in more-or-less these words,
"Frank, is your purpose to accuse me of disseminating anti-semitic
libels, under the guise of relaying rumors on the Internet."
Frank allows as how this is indeed his intent. I tell him that
in my opinion the stories about Israeli spies, as categorized
in a DEA report discussed by John Sugg of the
Daily Planet, by Justin Raimondo on antiwar.com,
on Fox News, by the French newsletter Intelligence Online and
various other news sources including the British Jane's, are
legitimate topics of comment, as are the stories about anthrax
dissemination, involving an anti-Arab researcher.
We go back on forth on such issues until
the static gets too bad. Later I retrieve a magnanimous message
from Frank saying that he is conferring with associates whether
to deal with me in the New Republic. So I assume that at some
point Cockburn will be stigmatized yet again as the purveyor
of anti-Semitic filth. It's all pretty predictable. The viler
the actions of Israel, the more rabid and undiscriminating the
assaults of their troops on Palestinians in the camps, the shriller
become charges here that almost any discussion of Israel or of
the Israel lobby here is by its very nature anti-semitic. The
day there's a photo of an Israeli soldier shoots a child next
to the font in that Bethlehem church you'll find a big story
in the New York Times about the troubling resurgence of anti-semitism,
with plenty of quotes from Abe Foxman of the ADL.
And on the topic of the NYT, have you
noticed how that great paper has had front page pieces rubbishing
the
Catholic Church as a nest of molesters every day for some time,
especially since Sharon invaded Ramallah. The uncharitable could
see this as a pre-emptive strike against Papal criticism of Israel's
actions, and also a means to shift attention away from the blood-stained
molestations of the adherents of one of the other monotheistic
religions.
Birmingham,
Alabama
Kathy Johnson and Dave Gesspass, stalwart
outposts of the National Lawyers' Guild, take me to Dreamland,
promoting it as homeport for some of Alabama's best barbecue.
The pork ribs are succulent, the sauce not excessively piquant,
nor too tomato-laden in flavor. I report as much to friends in
the Pacific northwest, and receive an emailed warning from Dave
Vest, member of the region's hottest blues band, the Cannonballs.
In earlier decades Dave lived in the south, and as readers of
this website know, toured with Tammy Wynette in the early years.
Dave warns that Cockburn "will observe a steady decline
in the quality of the bbq as he travels west. In Texas they will
feed him saddle leather with ketchup on it. The Amoco station
in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, will probably be his last chance
for a decent bag of boiled peanuts."
But where is bbq's equivalent to Clarksdale,
Miss, around which many of the greatest bluesmen grew up? How
come those Dreamland ribs were most definitely superior? Obviously
the sauce has a fair amount to do with it and the Dreamland mix
was fairly heavy on the vinegar end of the spectrum. The pulled
bbq at Jim and Nick's, also in Birmingham, was great too. There
are the issues of the pit, the hickory wood, the time. In California
you can rate expertise in the slow cooking department (now bizarrely
a fad of cooking columns, though a positive development overall)
not by barbecue but by the carnitas, where the best I've had
is at Hector's, in Watsonville where most of the Mexicans are
from Michoacan.
Further news comes from Vest to the effect
that the Clarksdale of bbq was a hole-in-the-wall place over
by what's now the medical center in Birmingham. "All the
musicians went there after hours. You had to rap on a sliding
wooden panel, if you were white. A black man took your order,
but you never saw him, like a confessor. You wanted to lie down
and roll in it when you got it."
Travel tips from musicians are always
worthwhile. Vest advised that "If you cross the Atchafalaya
Swamp on I-10, pull off at Henderson. The big service station
there is the one where Jerry Lee Lewis got mad because they were
selling pirated cassettes and carried the entire tape display
out by the pumps, poured gas on it, and lit it. The station manager
said 'Jesus Christ what will I tell the distributor?' Lewis,
walking to his bus, said, 'Tell him the killer was here.' I have
this from Robbie Parrish. He toured with Carl Perkins, too. Anyway,
out behind the execrable Landry's restaurant, there's a shed
that used to sell decent catfish po-boys." This kind of
expertise should be built, piece by piece, into America's answer
to the Odyssey.
Powell's
Trip
I return from Dreamland to my motel and
watch CNN reports of preliminary plans for Secretary of State
Colin Powell's urgent trip to bring peace to the Middle East.
His itinerary makes Odysseus' journey home from Troy to Ithaca
look like a model of decisive brevity. From Morocco, to Egypt,
to Spain and maybe a chat with Arafat by the following weekend.
It all looks like a conflict of interest to me. Is Powell a senior
official of the US government or under contract to Travel and
Leisure? I suppose the plan is to give Israeli troops plenty
of time to shoot more women and children, plus a few journalists
and push ahead with the project of rooting out "terrorism".
The next morning Kathy Johnson takes
me on a tour of Birmingham: the famous Baptist Church on 16th
St where the recently convicted bomber killed the four young
black women in the 1960s, the wonderful Civil Rights museum and
the Birmingham Art Museum, which has some fine paintings including
an odd Benjamin West, a good Courbet and a striking painting
from the dawn of abstract impressionism by Alfred Leslie (born
1927) called "A Survivor" painted in 1951 and donated
recently by Mr and Mrs Michael Strauss to the museum in honor
of the victims and survivors of the terrorist attacks of September
11, 2001. Later the museum's director tells me that the Strausses,
now in Birmingham having worked as lawyers in New York, had called
after 9/11 to ask what they could do and the museum's curator
of paintings, David Moos, had encouraged them to buy Field's
painting, which contains an image of the American flag and, at
the top, a collage of newspaper.
Elsewhere in the museum there are some
lovely landscapes from the 1930s, including An Aspen Forest by
the Santa Fe-based artist Victor Higgins and a landscape of heliotrope
and poppies in Marin county, by John Marshall Gamble. Of course
the rise of abstract expressionism after the War, actively encouraged
by the US government including the CIA, overwhelmed the tradition
of landscape documentary represented by Higgins, Gamble and the
artists involved in the WPA.
Between
Birmingham and Jackson:
Does the Trilateral Rule the World?
While I'm driving, Ben Sonnenberg calls
on my celphone from New York, sobbing with emotion at the obsequies
for the Queen Mother. He starts babbling about this being the
sort of thing the British do so well. I tell him that when he
was in the Scots Guards my grandfather Jack Arbuthnot used to
do guard duty at Balmoral and when the Queen Mother visited as
a little girl from Glamis Castle, she'd ride around the drawing
room on his shoulders. These days Major Jack would probably be
cashiered for child abuse.
At Tuscaloosa I turn south down Highway
68 which takes me to Moundville, site of the amazing mounds raised
by Indians sometime in the thirteenth century, probably after
a traveler returned from the Yucatan with news of the latest
architectural styles down south. Viewing the very substantial
amounts of dirt shoveled up into these mounds it's hard to maintain
any Rousseauian fanatasies about class equality among the indigenes
of that time.
I check into a motel outside Meridian,
hometown of Jimmy Rodgers, and took a look at e-traffic. The
Trilateral Commission is in executive session. The Washington
Times runs a silly piece where the reporter pours scorn on those,
mostly right-wing populists, who denounce it as a "Secret
World Government". Without irony, the reporter notes that
among those attending are 250 political and business "leaders"
from around the world, with the US fielding a strong team including
Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Greenspan and Paul Volcker. Absent
a few Chinese trillionaires too busy consulting their astrologers
to attend, this sounds like World Government to me.
The thing the conspiratorialists miss
is the disposability problem. In the old days world leaders,
captains of industry, bankers, politicians, died of heart attacks
or lung cancer not long after getting the gold watch for meritorious
service. Or they went to the penitentiary. In less decorous parts
of the world the hangman or the firing squad performed the same
purgative function as the First World's ribeye, gin martinis
or the Marlboro packet.
The elites are living longer, and so
the executive sessions of World Government--the Trilateral, Bilderberg,
Davos, Sun Valley, Aspen, Dubai, the Bohemian Grove proliferate.
Henry Kissinger pockets his speaker's fee and expenses, and anyone
challenging the consensus of these peripatetic world governors
gets cut off by the IMF.
I also find an attack on Rudy Bakhtiar
by the normally excellent Sam Smith, in his web newsletter Undernews.
"Watching Rudi Bakhtiar on CNN Headline News," Smith
sneers, "is like watching a film with the wrong sound track.
While we are as impressed as she clearly is with her natural
beauty and carefully honed sultriness, Bakhtiar lacks only a
fundamental understanding of what the hell she is talking about.
The ill-placed smirks, flirts, and eyebrow quirks appear at random,
sometime accompanying the most dire reports. It admittedly becomes
hypnotic once you notice the schizophrenic contrast between her
face and her mouth, but it doesn't seem to have much to do with
news."
The dirty brute. Rudy studied Brecht
in her days at Yale Drama School and is practising the famous
Brechtian A- effect, indicating to the audience by cunning artifice
her own distancing from the garbage her employers force her to
regurgitate. And what's the prissy stuff about "carefully
honed sultrinness". What does Smith want, the PBS look a
la Judy Woodruff?
Eventually CNN is drowned out by the
shouts of four youthful soccer teams also staying in the Comfort
Inn, rampaging around the Oscar Meyer wiener-wagon, a glistening
monument to fiber glass, outside my room.
Eudora
Welty and the WPA
I've been in some empty downtowns in
regional America, but Jackson on a Saturday morning is the deadest
I've ever seen. Eventually I find local rancher kids exhibiting
their Palominos in the fairgrounds and a vast flea market next
door, also barely populated. I buy an old 30 gallon iron cookpot
for $120, for my annual New Year gumbo party.
I am able to continue to enjoy art in
the WPA tradition. The local museum in Jackson, thermostat set
to a punishing chill on a fresh day, has an exhibition of 1930s
work by Eudora Welty and others, though sadly none of the 3,000
color photographs taken by the Farm Security Administration photographers
(Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and others) in the late 1930s),
which I've always felt probably present a more animated profile
of rural America in the Depression than the relentlessly gloomy
pictures of downhearted Okies that Evans and Lange specialised
in.
Of course the migrants were in poor circumstances
but I'll bet they smiled once in a while. One day I'll find the
time to look at these color photos in the Library of Congress.
Welty, who grew up in Mississippi, does catch more of the effervescence
of the human spirit in her photographs. She abandoned photography
after leaving her Rolliflex on a park bench in Paris. Irked by
her carelessness, she thereafter confined herself to writing,
which was scarcely the world's loss. Also in the exhibition are
exciting paintings from Mississippi artists of the 1930s like
John McCrady, Karl Wolfe and William Hollingsworth, who killed
himself in 1944 while still in his thirties. There's an amazing
painting, I think by Wolfe, of the assassination of Huey Long.
Elsewhere in the museum is a very moving temporary exhibition
of Kotz's photographs of his aunt's Mississippi garden. Kotz
himself now lives in Santa Fe.
The
Natchez Trace Parkway
It runs more or less the length of the
old trail that led from Nashville down to the Natchez settlement
started by the French in the eighteenth century. The "trace"
is the trail, which became a path, then essentially what in Ireland
is called a boreen, with the usual fords, food stands and so
forth. Starting in the 1930s it has been rehabbed by the Bureau
of the Interior, a bit like the Blue Ridge Parkway. Two lane,
with immaculate verges through woods, for about 150 miles. No
trucks. Not nearly enough camp sites, of which the Park service
doubtless lives in dread because poor people might take to living
there.
Natchez, once a flourishing entrepot
on the Mississippi, seems downhearted. The most conspicuous feature
is a rehabbed paddle boat called The Isle of Capri, serving as
a casino.
I head west across Louisiana, and get
a ticket just east of Leesville. The trooper's uniform says SWAT
and so does his cruiser's tag. I point out to him that everyone
else on this state highway was travelling over 70mph. Twenty
miles further west in Texas I would have been legal. He gazes
at my iron pot on the back seat, plainly thinking that not only
was I a methamphetamine dealer, but had the meth factory right
there in the back of my car. In the end he just gave me the ticket.
Huntsville,
End of the Line
I ended up in Huntsville, Texas, end
of the line for Karla Faye Tucker and many others. The woman
at the Holiday Inn gives me a guide to the town's incarceral
amenities. I drive round the prison, which once housed John Wesley
Hardin (allegedly slayer of 44, pardoned and ultimately a lawyer
in El Paso) and end up in the Prison Museum behind the Court
House. Here I view Old Sparky, a fine specimen of the joiner's
art put together by a convict himself convicted of murder and
sentenced to die in 1914, though later spared and ultimately
released.
Old Sparky, also known as the Texas Thunderbolt,
was the final seat of 361 men and women between 1924 and 1964.
A helpful note advises that the executioner would throw a switch
and put 2000 volts, producing 8 to 10 amps, through his victim,
thus rendering the condemned person unconscious "almost
immediately". After three to four seconds the executioner
would ease off the current to 500 to 1000 volts for one minute,
maintaining paralysis of the brain and other vital organs but
preventing the body from bursting into flames.
That explains why at least one execution
in the Florida death house a couple of years back was marred
by flames enveloping the dead man's head. The old craft skills
have died out. Young executioners these days just don't care.
Aside from George W. Bush's statement
refusing to commute Karla Faye's death sentence, along with her
lawyer's plea for life, there's a peremptory note in the Huntsville
museum about his last meal from one condemned man, J. Morrow
Jr: ""1 small steak (tender, no bone, no fat, cooked
rare-medium)." After listing other items, including three
bananas and a pint of chocolate ice cream, Morrow notes, "This
is my last meal, and damn it, I want it served hot on however
many plates and bowls it takes from mixing it up together."
I buy a couple of the museum's choice
postcards which feature Texas' forward looking approach down
the years: a man hanging from a tree, Old Sparky and the stretcher
bed on which the condemned in Texas these days get their terminal
doses of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium
chloride, sometimes in mistaken amounts that leave them paralysed
and in atrocious agony. On Texas' death row, 454 inmates currently
await the needle.
From the museum I go in search of one
of Huntsville's better known inmates, Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly.
It's billed as being on the front of a commercial building on
the 2100 block of Sam Houston Avenue, but seems to have made
way for a fast food joint. I eat a really bad barbecue plate,
confirming all Dave Vest's direst predictions, and head west.
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