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Today's Stories June 16 / 17, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Psychopathology of Shrinks John Halle Finkelstein and "The Progressive" Robert Fisk Welcome to "Palestine" Andy Worthington Return to Torture? Uri Avnery The Gaza Cage Fred Gardner Paris Hilton's Punishment: a False Parable Saul Landau Our Gang of Thugs: The 1970s as a Context for Terrorist Violence P. Sainath Heaven Can Wait: Creditors and the Widows of Vidharbha Missy Comley Beattie Calling Evil Its Name Alan Gregory When ADM Comes to Town: Killer Tax Breaks for Wildlife Destruction Walter Brasch Bush and the Philosophy of Swiss Cheese Website of the Weekend Obama Girl   June 15, 2007 Alan Farago View from the Construction Crane: Sex, Taxes and Real Estate Scams in Miami Andy Worthington The Ordeal of Ali al--Marri Michael Simmons Terrorizing Artists in the USA Franklin Lamb Blowback Across Lebanon: The Failed Sunni Army Solution Gary Leupp The Day After We Attack Iran John Ross Ballot Burning Time in Ol' Mexico Website of the Day The American Rationalist   June 14, 2007 Michael Donnelly Charred SUVs and the End of Citizen Eco--Activism Faisal Kutty Scare Canada: The No--Fly List's False Sense of Security Harry Browne Ireland's Green Party Sells Out Charles Jonkel From the Arctic to Yellowstone: Bears in a World of Indifference Steven Higgs Murder in a Small Town: "Gay Panic" in Indiana? Bruce Dixon Black Power Through Low Power Radio Bruce K. Gagnon What Do We Do Now? A 10--Step Plan for Antiwar Activists Website of the Day Finkelgate June 13, 2007 Glen Ford Obama's Siren Song Marjorie Cohn Repression in Oaxaca Bill Christison A Grave Injustice at DePaul University Silvia Cattori "I Was Not Prepared for the Horrors I Saw": an Interview with Hedy Epstein Richard Gott Racism and TV in Venezuela Firmin DeBrabander How the Neocons Misread Machiavelli William S. Lind The Perfect (Sine) Wave: Bombing Railroad Stations in Iraq Keith Rosenthal Workers Score a Victory at Harvard Website of the Day GOP and Monty Python Explain: "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" June 12, 2007 Jeffrey St. Clair How to Sell a War Paul Craig Roberts The Neocon Threat to American Freedom P. Sainath India's Plutocrats and the Press Ralph Nader The Biggest Scam in the World Omar Waraich A Black Day for Pakistan's Press Dave Lindorff Things Your Media Momma Didn't Tell You Harvey Wasserman Confessions of an Anti--Nuke Jerk Malini Johar Schueller It Takes a Bomb Ramzy Baroud War Foretold: Mark Twain and the Sins of Empire Website of the Day Palestinian Chronicle Needs Our Help!   June 11, 2007 Patrick Cockburn The War on Journalists Paul Craig Roberts Losing the Economy to Mythology Uri Avnery 40 Bad Years: the Rot of Occupation Norman Solomon The Silence of the Bombs Eva Liddell Paris Hilton Doesn't Do Dishes: How Barbie Stood Up to Allen Ginsberg Rannie Amiri Groundhog Day in Pakistan Rachel Voss Poetry and Politics in Nassau County Christopher Brauchli A Wild West Tale, Starring Rev. Dobson and Bill O'Reilly D. K. Wilson Untangling Michael Vick from the Dogs Website of the Day Paris, Mixed Up June 9 / 10, 2007 Alexander Cockburn Dissidents Against Dogma George Ciccariello--Maher Behind Venezuela's "Student Rebellion": Who's Pulling the Strings? Saul Landau An Interview with Ricardo Alarcon, Vice President of Cuba Robert Fisk Believe It or Not in the Middle East Brian Cloughley Troop Support: Deceptions and Insipid Sentiments Ron Jacobs Condoleezza Rice Names the System Ward Boston Searching for the Truth About the USS Liberty Conn Hallinan Dark Plots in Byzantine Beirut Leonard Peltier The Ongoing War on Native American Religious Practices Lawrence Davidson Israel's New Anti--Boycott Task Force John Ross Mass Nude--In Complicates Church--State Scuffling in Mexico Kate Allan Some People Think the Internet is a Bad Thing Fred Gardner Ignorance Marches On Stephen Fleischman Little Boy, Fat Man and Iran Monica Benderman Reading Tom Paine in a Time of Crisis Geoff Bailey A Real Oil Conspiracy: Gouged at the Pump Missy Beattie Faith and War Patrick Dyer A Democrat Revs Up Ohio's Death Machine Tim Lengerich Dispelling the Cowboy Myth: an Interview with George Wuerthner James Irani and David Rahni Perspectives on the Arrests of Iran--Americans in Tehran Gary Leupp The Unfair Treatment of Paris Hilton Michael Tillery The Heart of a Sportswriter: an Interview with David Aldridge Michael Simmons Beating Off the Squares: the Hipness of Anton Rosenberg Poets' Basement Laymon, Davies and Ford Website of the Weekend This is Sea Shepherd!   June 8, 2007 Serge Halimi What Sarkozy Learned About Politics from the US Patrick Cockburn The Turkish Incursion Jeffrey St. Clair Israel's Attack on the USS Liberty, Revisited   Paul Craig Roberts The Secret War William Blum What If NBC Cheered on a Military Coup Against Bush? Joshua Frank Swing--State Strategy: Looking for a Spoiler Lance Selfa How the Six Day War Changed the Middle East Dave Lindorff A "Criminal Conspiracy" in the White House Lawrence Ferlinghetti The Summer of Love: Flashbacks of a Human Be--In Website of the Day Robert Pollin: "Making the Federal Minimum Wage a Living Wage" June 7, 2007 Marjorie Cohn The Prison is the War Crime Soldz, Reisner and Olson: A Q & A on Psychologists and Torture Soldz, Reisner and Olson, et al: An Open Letter to Sharon Brehm, President of the American Psychological Association Paul Craig Roberts Losing Iraq, Nuking Iran Bill Quigley "How Long Must We Support a Mistake?" Silvia Cattori Sailing to Gaza Carl G. Estabrook What the June Bug Is: Politics in the Dismal Season Ellen Taylor Free the Tweakers!: The Good News About Meth Corporate Crime Reporter BAE Systems, Prince Bandar and the $2 Billion Account at the Riggs Bank Brenda Norrell Torture Training at Ft. Huachuca: Two Priests Face Prison for Exposing Torture in Arizona D. K. Wilson What Gary Sheffield Really Said Kevin Zeese Iraq Occupation Coming to a Head Over Oil Website of the Day How the Press Expired June 6, 2007 Alain Gresh Countdown to War on Iran Gary Leupp Poddy's Crazy Prayer: Bomb Iran, For Israel and America! Steven Sherman The Perils of Humanitarian Intervention Bruce Dixon Is Bill Gates Trying to Hijack Africa's Food Supply? Corporate Crime Reporter The Professor and the Nukes Brian M. Downing The Iraq War and Presidential Politics Ron Jacobs Luv n' Hate: a Different Take on the Summer of Love George Bisharat The Mirage of the Two State Solution Nicole Colson Over to You, Dante: Falwell's Ministry of Hate Bruce K. Gagnon From Italy to Guam: A Global Peace Movement is Taking Shape Website of the Day How the Democrats Should Treat Bush   June 5, 2007 Michael Neumann Canada in Afghanistan Jonathan Cook The Shin Bet and the Persecution of Azmi Bishara David Vest The Democrats' War Robert Fantina America's Cuba Policy Hoffman, Parsneau and Chowdhury CounterTerrorism as International Healthcare John V. Walsh Shaming the Official Antiwar Movement Richard Cretan Yellow Dog: The Strange Love of Martin Amis and Tony Blair Adam Engel Days of Dread: an American Tale William S. Lind The News from Anbar: Has Al Qaeda Over--Reached? Myles Hoenig Free the Oaks! Cut Down Those Yellow Ribbons! Jim Minick Lead--Foot Nation Website of the Day Punk Rock Soap Opera June 4, 2007 Nizar Latif An Interview with Moqtada al--Sadr Diana Johnstone Sarko and the Ghosts of May, 1968 Gregory Wilpert RCTV and Freedom of Speech in Venezuela Paul Watson The Anchorage Whale Killing Bureaucrats Summit Susan Rosenthal, MD How Cindy Sheehan Unmasked the Democrats Richard Ward The Right of Return to New Orleans Eva Liddell Don't Support the Troops Zahi Khouri Four Decades of Occupation Evelyn Pringle The FDA, GlaxoSmithKline and the Avandia Disaster China Hand About Those North Korean Benjamin Franklins ... Karyn Strickler George W. Bush: a "Ficeist" Leader Website of the Day The Guantanamo Files   June 2 / 3, 2007 Alexander Cockburn The Last of the Texas Outsiders Marc Levy Iraq Dead Ahead: a Brief Military History and Civilian Guide to Arlington National Cemetery Martin Smith Camilo Mejía's War: From Foot Soldier for Empire to Rebel for Peace Diana Johnstone Great Power Meddling in Kosovo John Ross The Oaxaca Volcano Stews Uri Avnery On Generals and Admirals Sunsara Taylor This is Not a Story About Cindy Sheehan Richard Neville Were the Hippies Right? P. Sainath The Farm Crisis and 100,000 Indian Widows Missy Comley Beattie Let's Roar Nisrine Abiad and Victor Kattan The Hariri Tribunal: a Fait Accompli? Rannie Amiri Lebanon, Bush and the Three Stooges Margot Pepper Deconstructing "Return to Sender" Eric Stewart Censorship and Cop Brutality in the New Bison Wars Ralph Nader The Halberstam Camp Dan Bacher A Victory for the Fish Shaun Harkin and Sandy Boyer Irish War Protesters on Trial Richard Rhames Selling Five Acres in Crawford Frederick Hudson The Rediscovery of Ella Fitzgerald Poets' Basement Lindorff, Landau and Buknatski Website of the Weekend Gimme Shelter June 1, 2007 Dave Marsh The FBI and the Godfather (of Soul): James Brown's FBI Files Saul Landau Return to Cuba: 47 Years Later in Havana David Phinney How the Baghdad Embassy Was Built: Forced Labor and Worker Abuse Robert Jensen The Bigot and the Boycott Stanley Heller Arrest Robert McNamara Yifat Susskind Indigenous Women Fight Back Robert Weissman Corporate Power Since 1980 Paul Buchheit Africa and Its Discontents William S. Lind The Folly of Maximalist Objectives Sherwood Ross 78,000 Iraqis Have Been Killed by Coalition Airstrikes Stephen Lendman Terrorism Defined Website of the Day Desert Autonomous Zone

Bloomsday 6 16 07 Bloom (impassionedly.) “These flying Dutchmen or lying Dutchmen as they recline in their upholstered poop, casting dice, what reck they? Machines is their cry, their chimera, their panacea. Laboursaving apparatuses, supplanters, bugbears, manufactured monsters for mutual murder, hideous hobgoblins produced by a horde of capitalistic lusts upon our prostituted labour. The poor man starves while they are grassing their royal mountain stags or shooting peasants in their purblind pomp of pelf and power. But their reign is rover for rever and ever and ev … ” Weekend Edition June 16 / 17, 2007 Was Tony Soprano the Teacher or the Taught? The Psychopathology of Shrinks By ALEXANDER COCKBURN Summer’s hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Traditionally, many Boston shrinks take their seaside weeks on Cape Cod, around Truro, sunning and gossiping while their patients muster on their beach towels a few hundred yards away. The touching scene is duplicated further south around the Hamptons on Long Island. Undoubtedly beach chat among both analysts and analysands will ripple over the June excitements of the psychoanalytic trade, starting with the gallant efforts of Paris Hilton’s psychiatrist, Dr Charles Sophy, to engineer what her costly but incompetent lawyers failed to do, namely spring her from L.A. County Jail where – given the triviality of her offenses - she is grotesquely pent. But of course the prime topic will surely be the end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco's Jennifer Melfi – Tony Soprano’s analyst -- has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J. Cobb starred in The Three Faces of Eve. Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States have been deploring the “breach of professional ethics” at a shrinks’ dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes in which the identity of Dr Melfi’s patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren’t seducing their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud’s chambers in Vienna. It’s true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a sociopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient, the climax of a process identified back in 1999 in the British Medical Journal by Dr Tony David as the collision of “the superego of Melfi’s civilised values and the intellect… with the murky id that is Soprano’s stock in trade.” “The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association”, wrote one APA member furiously, “do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature (unless there is danger to the therapist).” It so happens that these same “strict ethical principles” of the APA have been the topic of unsparing rebuke which probably won’t be cited much on those holiday beaches. A recent report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General confirms what has been detailed in a number of news stories since 2005 concerning the starring role played by American psychologists and psychoanalysts in devising and supervising torture techniques as administered by the U.S. military in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other secret interrogation centers run by the CIA. These techniques -- as has been recently described here by Stephen Soldz have been “reverse-engineered” from the Pentagon’s SERE (“Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape”) program in which US military and intelligence personnel are taught how to withstand harsh interrogation. Psychologists have always been central to this enterprise and are now similarly central to the use of sleep deprivation, sexual and cultural humiliation and waterboarding in grilling America’s enemies. “Reverse-engineered” simply means the Pentagon is using the techniques to torture suspected terrorists. In 2002 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that “interrogation methods used were no longer effective in obtaining useful information from some detainees” and, as the Inspector General’s report details, “recommended that the Federal Bureau of Investigation Behavioral Science Unit, the Army's Behavioral Science Consultation Team, the Southern Command Psychological Operations Support Element, and the JTF-170 clinical psychologist develop a plan to exploit detainee vulnerabilities.” The use of dogs, sexual humiliation, and kindred tortures were only a couple of months away. Amid furious protests from such APA members as Soldz and others the APA leadership has piously maintained that "psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective." The Pentagon Inspector General’s Report make clear this claim is ludicrous. So here we have shrinks refining Tony Soprano’s brutish violence, draping his id with the national flag. The August meeting of the APA’s “Council of Representatives” will be stormy as the members vote on a motion introduced by Neil Altman urging "A moratorium on psychologist involvement in interrogations at US detention centers for foreign detainees.” “Peer Review” and Global Warming There were yelps of alarm and the rustle of skirts being hoist knee-high after I published a note on sources in my column last week, Dissidents against Dogma. The panic was caused by one of the references to the work of Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski who, as I wrote, has written devastating onslaughts on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. Jaworowski has pointed out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the “unprecedented levels” of modern CO2. I offered a couple of references to Jaworowski, one of them to an essay, "Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase", published in 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1997. It turns out that this is a publication put out by the LaRouche crowd. Next thing you know, poor Jaworowski was being accused oif being a neo-Nazi cultist, with kindred vitriol hurled at CounterPunch co-editor Cockburn. George Monbiot used to it as the excuse to add Jaworowski to the enormously long list of books and articles he refuses to read because they have not been “peer-reviewed”, thus leaving the honorary chairman of the King Canute Action Committee safely sequestered from any information that might discomfit his prejudices. I strongly doubt that Jaworowski knows much or indeed anything about the more sinister and odious aspects of the LaRouch enterprise, and sent along his paper because they asked him to. The article in the Larouche magazine merely repeats the claims and supporting arguments that Jaworowski has published in other journals. I cited one of these, "Do Glaciers Tell a True CO2 Story", The Science of the Total Environment, 144, 1992) pp 227-284. Another example would be Environmental Science and Pollution Research ("Ancient atmosphere: Validity of ice records," Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 161 - 171, 1994). These are peer-reviewed journals, so the papers must count as "science" according to Monbiot's labor-saving epistemology. Since the whole mechanism of “peer review” is less than a century old I wonder Monbiot deals with science before the mid-twentieth century. He probably disdains it on principle. As a reader noted to me, “How, I wonder, would Monbiot handle the idea of science that thus contradicts itself? Like many another climate-crisis alarmist (most notably the chief of them, Al Gore), he combines a humble layman's deference to "what the scientists tell us" with an oddly childlike and deeply obscurantist impression of the way scientists actually work. If everybody in a field of research started talking as if the supreme court had now ruled on a question, or some authoritative magisterium spoken--leaving nothing more to be asked there--you could tell something had gone radically awry. But the mirage of just such an untroubled consensus is where Monbiot appears to have placed his ardent faith, in the teeth of facts to the contrary. It's the rhetoric of science that convinces him, more than the reality.” I also suspect Monbiot was being disingenuous in dismissing Jaworowski as a crank, since a glance at Google would have disclosed to him a cartload of obviously “peer-reviewed” papers by Jaworowski, many of them published by the distinguished Dutch publishing house of Elsevier, which publishes scientific books and journals and is not, I can assert with perfect confidence, not part of the LaRouche operation. There were also claims that Jaworowski had somehow discounted the effects of nuclear radiation, particularly at Chernobyl. Actually, Jaworowski’s article "The Real Chernobyl Folly" was quite reasonable. He clearly acknowledges the acute radiation deaths of the 'first responders'. His points about some of the uninformed and wasteful countermeasures, the real psychological damage caused by panic, and the exaggerated claims of victimhood, etc., etc., were all quite sensible. Jaworowski does seem to favor the use nuclear power, as do many advocates of the anthropogenic origins of global warming. Apropos “peer review” Martin Hertzberg, sent me an amusing note last week: “When people ask me how can I possibly disagree with all the Nobel Prize winners who have signed on to the theory of the human causation of global warming, I tell them the Einstein story of the ‘Anti-Relativity Society’. “After Einstein left Berlin and after Hitler took over, the Nazis were not happy with Relativity Theory, which of course they didn't understand, and which they considered a ‘Jewish science’. There were many distinguished German scientists who were eager to please their new masters, some of them even Nobel Prize winners, so they formed an ‘Anti-Relativity Society’ that published papers trying to show that Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, was wrong. “When Einstein was asked about it later, he smiled and responded to the effect that if his Special Theory of Relativity was really wrong, it didn't take an army of physicists or Nobel Laureates to prove him wrong: just one physics student with a single experiment or observation that contradicted his theory, would suffice! “One can be sure that all the publications in the Anti-Relativity Journal were peer reviewed. My experience in reviewing papers and in having my papers reviewed, has caused me to reject the whole idea of "anonymous" peer review. The potential for abuse is too great. When I reviewed papers, I always insisted that the Journal Editor inform the author that I was the reviewer and was prepared to support my review openly. Planck himself was the only one who reviewed Einstein's seminal 1905 papers. Zeitschrift fur Physik was his Journal and everyone knew who the reviewer was.” Martin Hertzberg’s papers, incidentally, are being scanned by CounterPunch business manager Becky Grant, a task postponed last week because Becky was in Utah with her family attending the wedding of her sister Tiffany, who is the designer of our CounterPunch Books. Best wishes to Tiffany Wardle de Sosa and her husband Miguel Sosa as they settle in San Jose. I strongly encourage readers to go to David Noble’s essay “Regression on the Left” which has very useful material on the origins of peer review. It can be found here http://climateguy.blogspot.com/ peer review on the website of Denis Rancourt, the Ottawa-based physicist and radical whose excellent essay Global Warming: Truth or Dare,also featured in my list of references and which was presumably also skirted by the testy Monbiot because of its peerless status. Noble describes how the postwar National Research Foundation (later, also called the National Science Foundation “adopted a new mechanism of exclusion: ‘peer review.’ Only peers - fellow privileged professionals, whatever their unacknowledged ties to commercial enterprise - could be involved in deciding upon the merits and agenda of science. Peer review was a relatively novel concept. Editors of journals had in the past, at their own discretion on an ad hoc basis, referred manuscripts to anonymous reviewers before publication to aid them in their decisions, but this would now become required and routinized into standard practice. Peer review certainly had its benefits, such as credibility (peer review as PR), convenient credentialling (no need to read it if it has been peer reviewed), and consensus-building (through mutual back-scratching). “But it also had its costs, such as prior censorship (by interested parties), and, especially, the coercive encouragement of conformity. If peer review served to immunize science from democratic scrutiny and intervention, it also imposed a measure of like-mindedness upon the scientific community itself, mistakenly celebrated as consensus. Invariably, this tended to narrow the scope of respectable discourse and, hence, of the scientific imagination, inbreeding often entailing a degree of enfeeblement. A safeguard against error, it might also eliminate eccentric approaches and illuminating mistakes, often the key to significant discovery. And if intended to insure that only correct papers were permitted to be published, why then the need for the community of science at all? Peer review before publication would suffice to guarantee that only the truth prevailed. “Such perils of peer review were early detected and condemned by the physicist Albert Einstein, after his arrival in America. Having submitted a co-authored paper to the journal Physical Review, he was dismayed to learn that it had bean sent by the editor to an anonymous reviewer. ‘We had sent our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed,’ an irate Einstein wrote the editor. ‘On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.’ Einstein never again contributed to that journal. In Germany he had published in a journal edited by Max Planck, whose editorial philosophy was ‘to shun much more the reproach of having suppressed strange opinions than of having been too gentle in evaluating them.’ Despite its defects, peer review became the hallmark of the exclusive scientific establishment (and, eventually - and disastrously - of all of academia), and for a short while the hegemony of the elite remained relatively secure.” Then came the challenges, few more influential than the work of Rachel Carson, whose work I assume Monbiot disdains because she was never peer-reviewed and didn’t even have a PhD. So much for you, Rachel! Monbiot now states grandly that he has concluded his attacks on the views advanced here. I must congratulate him at least for a perfect record in not addressing a single issue of substantive science, preferring to scurry about in the underbrush, ranting about peer review and LaRouchies. It beats thinking.

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