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/ St. Clair's Scorching New History of a Decade of War
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Today's Stories
June 26 / 27, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Venezuela: the Gang's All Here
June 25, 2004
Stephen
Gowans
US to North Korea: "Trust Us"
Saul Landau
2006 Pentagon Budget as Sacrilege: Bush
Invests the National Treasure in Death and Destruction
Amir
Butler
Iraq: the Deadly Embrace
Jack McCarthy
Another Times Plagiarism Scandal? Did
Maureen Dowd Lift from the World Weekly News?
Greg
Bates
Chomsky and Zinn Plan to Vote Nader
June 24, 2004
Gary Leupp
John
Lehman on the Iraq / al-Qaeda Links
Patrick Cockburn
A
Day in the Life of Col. Abu Mohammed: Defusing Bombs, Facing
Death Threats
Harry Browne
On
the Rebound: Bush Bounces Back...in Europe
Bill Kaufman
Another
Marxist for Kerry: Joel Kovel's Sad Smear of Ralph Nader
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush,
Cheney and the 9/11 Commission: What Did They Know? What Did
They Tell?
Rick Gioimbetti
Andrea Yates: Victim of Psychiatric Violence?
John Chuckman
Call Center ID Hypocrisy
Diane Johnstone
Kerry
and Kosovo: the Lie of a "Good War"
June 23, 2004
Laura Carlsen
Bush
and Castro Face Off
Dave Zirin
Barry
Bonds vs. Boston: "A Flea Market of Racism"
Kurt Nimmo
From
Saddam, With Love
Patricia Wolff
Foundation Wars
Mahboob A. Khawaja
"They Had Me Arrested and Shackled My Son"
Patrick Cockburn
The
Pretense of an Independent Iraq
Website of the Day
The Road to Abu Ghraib
June 22, 2004
Dave Lindorff
The
Meaning of Putin's Pronouncement: Mutually Assured Pre-emption
Ron Jacobs
Nuclear Plants in US Protectorate of Iraq?
Vanessa Jones
Coogee, Peter Garrett and Valium Earrings
Mickey Z
An Open Letter to the People of Iraq
John L. Hess
Clinton Exhales
Pedro Marset/Ex-Solidarity
Committee for Pacho Cortés
An Exchange on the Case of Pacho Cortés
Bruce Jackson
Saying
No to Prosecutors: Why Steve Kurtz's Colleagues Refused to Testify
Website of the Day
From Boot Camp to Boot Hill
June 21,
2004
Gary Leupp
Putin's Helpful Remarks
Lucson
Pierre-Charles
Haiti After the Press Went Home: Chaos
Upon Chaos
Cockburn
/ Khan
Saddam May Face Death Penalty
Uri
Avnery
Irreversible Mental Damage
June 19
/ 20, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Inside the Green Zone: US is Paranoid
and Isolated
Bruce
Anderson
Frozen Gringos
Diane
Christian
Morality and Death: a Meditation on
Bush and Blake
Walter
A. Davis
Passion of the Christ in Abu Ghraib
Josh
Frank
How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother Nature
Col. Dan
Smith
Respectable Genocide?: the Crisis in Sudan
Brian
Cloughley
A Profound Disruption of the Senses
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush and the Timken Plant, a Year Later
Prudence
Crowther
Mr. Ashcroft, Deport Me!
Poets'
Basement
Iqbal/Alam, Krieger and Albert
Kathy
Kelly
Dying to See Their Kids
June 18,
2004
Chris
Floyd
Blood Victory
Dave Zirin
Danielle Green, Basketball Player &
Disabled Vet, Speaks Out Against War
Justin
E.H. Smith
The Christian Question in American Politics
Gary
Leupp
The "Long-Established" Link?:
Iraq, al-Qaeda, and al-Zarqawi
June
17, 2004
Noel
Ignatiev
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People
of Palestine
Kurt
Nimmo
The Bush-Kerry Conundrum
Ed
Cardoni
The Persecution of Steve Kurtz
Ron Jacobs
Power Relations: Rounding Up Everyone Who Knows More Than They Do
Dave
Lindorff
Philly Daily News: "Four Wasted Years"
Greg
Moses
Geneva Ignored
Norm
Dixon
How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical
Weapons
June
16, 2004
Lenni
Brenner
A Question for Kerry Supporters
Davey
D
Hip Hop Reflections on Reagan
Daniel
Wolff
Why Did Michael Moore Withhold Video Evidence of US Prisoner
Abuse?
Bruce
Jackson
Harry Levin and the Penultimate Manuscript of Finnegans Wake
Patrick
Cockburn
Boom! Boom! Out Go the Lights: Bombings Target Oil and Power
Facilities
Gary
Handschumacher
Mourn Ben Linder, Not His Killer: Reagan's Death Squads
JG
Turning Haiti into One Big Sweatshop
Mario
Benedetti
Obituary with Cheers
Vicente
Navarro
Meet the New Head of the IMF: Who
is Rodrigo Rato?
Website
of the Day
Iraqi Oil Revenue Watch
June
15, 2004
Harry
Browne
Ireland Adds a Brick to Fortress Europe
Neve
Gordon
The Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited
David
Palmer
Richard Armitage, Abu Ghraib and CACI
John
Blair
Lovelock's Misguided Call: Nukes Are No Solution to Global Warming
Dave
Lindorff
God Wins in TKO
Bill
Quigley
Blood-Pouring Peace Activists: State Charges Dropped; Feds Step
In
Patrick
Cockburn
Carbombs and Street Dances: 13 More Killed in Baghdad Blast
John
Chuckman
John Kerry, Political Placebo
June
14, 2004
John
Stanton / Wayne Madsen
Torture, Inc: Oliver North Joins
the Party
Kathy
Kelly
Requiems: What Happens When Compassion Dies?
Bruce
Jackson
Bush Gets Testy About Torture
Lee
Sustar
Strikers Defy Visteon's Company Thugs
Kurt
Nimmo
The Desperate Censors: the Republican Plot to Kill Farhenheit
9/11
Jim
Davis
Hard Right Nativism
Eliot
Katz
Death and War
Uri
Avnery
The Nightmare Comes True
Website
of the Day
Instruments of Statecraft
June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto
and Runnymede
Team
CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary
Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe
Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt
Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg
Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st
Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
| Weekend
Edition
June 26/27, 2004
Venezuela:
the Gang's All Here
Replay of
Chile and Nicaragua?
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
You
can set your watch by it. The minute some halfway decent government
in Latin America begins to reverse the order of things and give the
have-nots a break from the grind of poverty and wretchedness, the usual
suspects in El Norte rouse themselves from the slumber of indifference
and start barking furiously about democratic norms. It happened in 1973
in Chile; we saw it again in Nicaragua in the 1980s; and here’s
the same show on summer rerun in Venezuela, pending the August 15 recall
referendum of President Hugo Chávez.
Chávez
is the best thing that has happened to Venezuela’s poor in a very
long time. His government has actually delivered on some of its promises,
with improved literacy rates and more students getting school meals.
Public spending has quadrupled on education and tripled on healthcare,
and infant mortality has declined. The government is promoting one of
the most ambitious land-reform programs seen in Latin America in decades.
Most
of this has been done under conditions of economic sabotage. Oil strikes,
a coup attempt and capital flight have resulted in about a 4 percent
decline in GDP for the five years that Chávez has been in office.
But the economy is growing at close to 12 percent this year, and with
world oil prices near $40 a barrel, the government has extra billions
that it’s using for social programs. So naturally the United States
wants him out, just as the rich in Venezuela do. Chávez was re-elected
in 2000 for a six-year term. A US-backed coup against him was badly
botched in 2002.
The
imperial script calls for a human rights organization to start braying
about irregularities by their intended victim. And yes, here’s
José Miguel Vivanco of Human Rights Watch. We last met him in
this column helping to ease a $1.7 billion US aid package for Colombia’s
military apparatus. This time he’s holding a press conference
in Caracas, hollering about the brazen way Chávez is trying to
expand membership of Venezuela’s Supreme Court, the same way FDR
did, and for the same reason: that the Venezuelan court has been effectively
packed the other way for decades, with judicial flunkies of the rich.
I don’t recall Vivanco holding too many press conferences to protest
that perennial iniquity.
The
“international observers” recruited to save the rich traditionally
include the Organization of American States and the Carter Center; in
the case of the Venezuelan recall they have mustered dead on schedule.
On behalf of the opposition, they exerted enormous pressure on the country’s
independent National Electoral Council during the signature-gathering
and verification process. Eventually the head of the OAS mission had
to be replaced by the OAS secretary general because of his unacceptable
public statements.
The
Carter Center’s team is headed by Jennifer McCoy, whose forthcoming
book, The Unraveling of Representative Democracy in Venezuela, leans
heavily against the government. One of its contributors is José
Antonio Gil of the Datanalysis Polling Firm, most often cited for US
media analysis. The Los Angeles Times quoted Gil on what to do: “And
he can see only one way out of the political crisis surrounding President
Hugo Chávez. ‘He has to be killed,’ he said, using
his finger to stab the table in his office far above this capital’s
filthy streets. ‘He has to be killed.’”
Media
manipulation is an essential part of the script, and here, right on
cue, comes Bill Clinton’s erstwhile pollster, Stan Greenberg,
still a leading Democratic Party strategist. Greenberg is under contract
to RCTV, one of the right-wing media companies leading the Venezuelan
opposition and recall effort. It’s a pollster’s dream job.
Not only does he have enormous resources against an old-fashioned, politically
unsophisticated poor people’s movement, but his firm has something
comrades back home can only fantasize about: control over the Venezuelan
media. Imagine if the right wing controlled almost the entire media
during Clinton’s impeachment.
That’s
the situation in Venezuela. Just think what Greenberg’s associate,
Mark Feierstein-a veteran of similar NED efforts in ousting the Sandinistas
in the 1990 elections-can do with this kind of totalitarian media control.
NED? That’s the National Endowment for Democracy, praised not
so long ago by John Kerry, who, like Bush, publicly craves the ouster
of Chávez.
The
NED is coming over the hill arm in arm with the CIA and CIA-backed institutions
in the AFL-CIO, where John Sweeney’s team has dismally failed
to clean house. The NED has helped fund the opposition to Chávez
to the tune of more than $1 million a year. Among the recipients are
organizations whose leaders actually supported the April 2002 coup-they
signed the decree that overthrew the elected president and vice president
and abolished the country’s democratic institutions, including
the Constitution, Supreme Court and National Assembly. The coup was
thwarted only because millions of Venezuelans rallied for Chávez.
Left
out of the coup government, despite his support for it, was Carlos Ortega,
head of the CTV (Central Labor Federation). The AFL’s Solidarity
Center, successor to the CIA-linked AIFLD, gets more than 80 percent
of its funding from the NED and USAID and has funneled NED money to
Ortega and his collaborators. The Solidarity Center has been up to its
ears in opposition plotting, a reprise of the Allende years, when the
AFL helped destroy Chilean democracy. The AFL has denied any role, but
Rob Collier, an excellent San Francisco Chronicle reporter, recently
gave a detailed refutation of AFL apologetics in an exchange in the
current New Labor Forum. “In Venezuela,” he writes, “the
AFL-CIO has blindly supported a reactionary union establishment as it
tried repeatedly to overthrow President Hugo Chávez-and, in the
process, wrecked the country’s economy.
The CTV worked in lockstep with FEDECAMARAS, the nation’s business
association, to carry out the three general strikes/lockouts”
of 2001, 2002 and 2003. The CTV, Collier says, was directly involved
in coup organizing, and its leader was scheduled to be part of the new
junta.
The
end of this particular drama has yet to be written. The left here in
the United States could make a difference if it got off its haunches
and threw itself into the fray.
Weekend Edition June 12 / 13, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Remembering the Common Hood: Soweto and Runnymede
Team CounterPunch
CP's Favorite Albums
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Troy, Now and Then
Gary Leupp
Not Really a Puppet Government in Iraq?
Brian
Cloughley
US Military in Crisis
Antonio
Ponvert, III
Iraqi Prisoner Abuse: the Connecticut Connection
Ben
Tripp
The Polls Get Stupider
Joe Bageant
Mash Note to the "Girl with the Leash"
Ron
Jacobs
The Return of the Hip Hop Insurgency
Forrest
Hylton
Object Lessons from the Case of Francisco Cortés
Christopher
Brauchli
Federal Bureau of Errors
Kurt Nimmo
Going After Qaddafi, Again
Wayne
Madsen
Israel's Slap at Reagan
Anthony
Loewenstein
Al Jazeera Awakens the Arab World
Michael
Donnelly
A Lightship in the Forest: Greenpeace Docks in the Siskiyous
Greg Moses
Who Will Tell Us More About the Workers of Nasiriyah?
Susan
Davis
Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban
Joseph
Ramsey
Weather Report: a Review of The Weather Underground
Niranjan
Ramakrishnan
The 18th Brumaire in the 21st Century
Wayne
Saunders
The Gipper, D-Day and the Stanley Cup
Poets'
Basement
Richey, Ford, La Morticella, Albert
Website
of the Weekend
Insurgent Music
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