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HOT HOT HOT New CounterPunch Print Edition! Meet actual Iraqis and not just Western caricatures. Laith al-Saud interviews top man in Iraq's national resistance. It's not just Abu Ghraib and bids to kill Fidel Castro. Torture and assassination are integral parts of America's imperial machine. Don't miss Andrew Wimmer's searing journey into the soul of a nation that tortures as a way of life. Plus Alexander Cockburn on the killing of General Kassem. PLUS Sam Sillen's rollicking exhumation of Edmund Wilson as Malthusian Trostskyite. Get the answers you're looking for in the latest subscriber-only 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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October 15, 2005 Alexander Cockburn October 14, 2005 Farrah Hassen Ron Jacobs Sasha Kramer Katrina Yeaw Nicole Colson Raúl Zibechi Nikolas Kozloff Website of the Day
Jeremy Scahill Jeff Birkenstein Brendan Smith / Jeremy Brecher Stan Cox Anis Memon Gary Leupp Dave Zirin Matthew Koehler Werther Website of
the Day
Omar Waraich William Cook Phil Gasper Dave Lindorff Matt Vidal John Gautreaux Diana Johnstone Mark Weisbrot Brian J. Foley Website of
the Day
October 11, 2005 Roger Morris
/ Steve Schmidt Lila Rajiva Bill Quigley Paul Craig Roberts Dave Lindorff Dr. Teresa Whitehurst Mitchel Cohen Tariq Ali Website of
the Day
October 10, 2005 Cindy and Craig
Corrie Joshua Frank Gideon Levy Alan Wallis Mickey Z. CounterPunch News Service Paul Craig
Roberts Website of the Day
October 8 / 9, 2005 Alexander Cockburn Ralph Nader Jennifer Van Bergen Saul Landau Jeff Halper Lenni Brenner Nikolas Kozloff Brian Cloughley Alice Slater John Gautreaux Fred Gardner Niranjan Ramakrishnan M.G. Piety Tom Gorman Mike Whitney Aseem Shrivastava Ben Tripp Poets' Basement
October 7, 2005 Larry Johnson Will Youmans Dave Lindorff Judith Scherr Russell D. Hoffman Jared Bernstein Jennifer Van
Bergen Website of
the Day
P. Sainath Scott Parkin Paul Craig
Roberts Andréa Schmidt Dave Lindorff Joshua Frank M. Junaid Alam Matthew Koehler Robert Pollin
October 5, 2005 Heather Gray Robert Jensen Ramzy Baroud Col. Dan Smith Dave Zirin Paul Craig Roberts Alan Maass
October 4, 2005 Nikolas Kozloff Mike Roselle Joshua Frank John Chuckman Alan Farago Mickey Z. Christine & Ethan Rose Gary Leupp Website of the Day
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Roberts Joshua Frank Seth Sandronsky Jeffrey St. Clair
October 1 / 2, 2005 Cockburn
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Alaya Uri
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Moses Brian
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Basement Website
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Geddry Paul
Craig Roberts Dave
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Russ Feingold Carl
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Weekend Edition CounterPunch DiaryAyatollahs of the ApocalypseBy ALEXANDER COCKBURN These are triumphant hours for Pat Robertson. His standing as America's senior ayatollah is becoming firmer as Billy Graham and even Jerry Falwell yield the prime-time pulpit to the smooth-tongued maestro of the Christian Coalition. A decade ago CNN would sooner have given half an hour's air time to the leader of North Korea, but last week Wolf Blitzer poked a stick through the bars, and nodded respectfully as Robertson raved on about the End Time:
Robertson rose gracefully to the challenge:
Blizer wagged his head like a mental hospital attendant placating a noisy inmate, and then poked his stick through the bars again:
More placatory nods from the hospital attendant:
After chiding James ("Focus on the Family") Dobson for hyperbolic language, Robertson closed out the interview a few minutes later by claiming that Venezuela's president Hugo Chavez, whose assassination he had recently recommended, was building a nuclear arsenal and had sent Osama bin Laden a million dollars after 9/11. The sobering part of all this is that all the same words could have come out the mouth of the President, whose relationship to Jesus and expectations of the End Time are probably more intense than Robertson's, since the latter is a seasoned professional, rather than an inspired amateur. Reagan used to talk about the End Time equably too, once stressing that it could occur in "our lifetime". Journalists like Blitzer should raise the issue more frequently, both to ayatollahs of the Apocalypse like Robertson and to the President. It would give press conferences a certain gloomy zest. The only mystery is why, given his Apocalyptic expectations, Robertson fusses about the threat of a Chavez and calls for his murder by the CIA. He surely cannot think that the Venezuelan leader will be spared the Lord's coming wrath, when the saved rise up in the great celestial spiral and the damned are consigned to the pit. Why ask the CIA to do what the Almighty will soon take care of?
The Virtues
of Gas Guzzling: Since I don't believe in "peak oil" (the notion that world production is peaking and will soon slide, plunging the world into economic chaos) and regard oil "shortages" as contrivances by the oil companies and allied brokers and middlemen to run up the price, I fill my aging fleet of 50s and 60s era Chryslers with a light heart, although for longer trips these days I fill an 82 Mercedes 240D with diesel. True, diesel these days costs more than high-octane gasoline but the Mercedes gets 35 miles to the gallon, whereas the 59 Imperial ragtop and the 62 Belevedere wagon get around 18 mpg, which is still way ahead of the SUVs. Part of my light-heartedness comes from the fact that gas guzzling these days can be a revolutionary duty, like puffing Montecristo #4 Cuban cigars back in the 60s as a way of doing one's bit for the Cuban revolution. A while ago, Citgo stations were owned by City Services, which was controlled by the W. Alton Jones family, which amassed a vast fortune thereby. Subsequently the Alton Jones family foundation, exercised via strategic disbursement control over much of the environmental movement, such as World Wildlife Fund, National Wildlife Federation, Worldwatch. As with the other big donors such as Pew Charitable Trusts, the Alton Jones foundation cut loose any green group showing signs of disruptive militancy. So I used to give Citgo a wide birth, until Citgo and its 14,000 gas stations and eight oil refineries (undamaged by Katrina) passed into the hands of the Venezuelan national oil company. Alas, Citgo signs aren't a prominent feature of the landscape in northern California or west of the Rockies. I just drove across Texas and Citgo outlets are everywhere, as they are in Florida and the Carolinas. But even if you can't pump Citgo gas, guzzling keeps up overall oil demand, and hence oil prices, thus helping not only Venezuela but also Russia, which needs every rouble it can get. Not so long ago, Venezuela's president, Hugo Chavez, said Venezuela could afford to slash Citgo's prices by cutting out the middle men. He outlined a plan is to set aside 10 per cent of the 800,000 barrels of oil produced by the Citgo refineries and ship that oil directly to schools, religious organizations and nonprofits in poor communities for distribution. Chavez has yet to take up my suggestion that Citgo start offering its customers gift vouchers which could be redeemed in the form of free consulations over the internet with one of the 16,000 Cuban doctors in Venezuela. But surely it's only a matter of time. Already he's made a wildly popular foray into the Bronx and promised social action in the Chicago area as well as along the Gulf coast. Maybe Bush should throw in the towel and make Chavez the head of FEMA. After all, Chavez is a military man, and Bush wants the military to take a lead role in emergencies. You might suppose that Citgo's competitors might strike back by raising signs, rather in the manner of some motel-owners here battling the Gujerati families now controlling 70 per cent of the business, urging motorist to patronize "American-owned" filling stations. But that would cut out Shell and BP, and the latter, like Chevron-Texaco and Mobil, is in partnership with Petroleos de Venezuela, the national Venezuelan oil company and would not want needlessly to offend the government. Since the failure of the coup against Chavez it backed in 2002 the US government has subcontracted its public propaganda against Chavez to Pat Robertson, who given Rev Falwell's fade-out, has been trying to consolidate his position as America's leading ayatollah,. Robertson promptly overplayed his hand by calling for Chavez's assassination, and most recently accusing him of planning to build up a nuclear arsenal. Someone ought to tell Robertson that accusations pertaining to WMD haven't got a high retail value these days. He'd be better off saying Chavez had labs working on avian flu strains designed to target Protestants of Scotch origin. Then Chavez wrong-footed Uncle Sam again by telling Ted Koppel that the Pentagon was working on a military coup, Operation Balboa, designed to overthrow his government. Having learned that pugnacious verbal exchanges only increase Chavez's popularity across Latin America, the US Ambassador in Caracas, issued a low key denial saying that yes, there was an Operation Balboa but it was four years old, Spanish in origin. The plan included Venezuela in "a simulated military exercise". This takes us back to the attempted coup of 2002, of which Chavez has accused former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of playing a role. And what sane person does not believe the Pentagon and CIA are working diligently, in collaboration with Colombia, to oust Chavez? So fill up at Citgo, at least until the price of oil drops and Chavez decides to sell the chain to the Chinese. And what of "peak oil", the theory that oil is about to run out? Since we're all supposed to be dying of avian flu in the near future, who cares since there'll be no one around to work the pumps or even drive up to them? I don't believe in any effective role of man-made CO2 in global warming, a natural cyclical trend. I think the mad rush to throw money at the pharmaceutical companies for an avian flu vaccine is ridiculous. And increasingly, I don't believe we're about to run out of oil. I hang my hat on the views of Dr.Thomas Gold (founding director of Cornell University Center for Radiophysics) as outlined in his 1999 book, The Deep Hot Biosphere. Gold's view, supported by many
well qualified people, is that oil doesn't come from dead dinosaurs
and kindred organic matter. Gold argues strongly that oil is
a "renewable, primordial soup continually manufactured by
the Earth under ultrahot conditions and tremendous pressures.
As this substance migrates toward the surface, it is attached
by bacteria, making it appear to have an organic origin dating
back to the dinosaurs." Oil, Earth's renewable resource!
Ethanol is an attractive alternative, as Brazil is proving.
But ethanl will be a tough sell here, so for the time being I'll
stay with the winning side. Werther and William Jennings Bryan Werther, on our home page last Thursday, took a swipe at William Jennings Bryan and this drew a note of protest from Susan Fahey:
I stand shoulder to shoulder with Susan Fahey in her defense of Bryan, but I'm not sure she's correct in suggesting that it was "his fiery rhetoric" that prompted Werther to compare Bryan to the Ayatollahs of our time. Werther's hyperbolical style is modeled on H.L. Mencken who made fun of Bryan (a better man than him) for decades, and as readers of Emmett Tyrrell Jr, whose monthly aping of Mencken in the American Spectator was a grim feature of the 1980s, well know, addiction to Menckenese is a dangerous and often accelerating condition. Werther's Jeremiads are a splendid adornment to our site, but I sometimes wish he would temper his homages to H.L.M. with echoes of a purer prose writer, J. Swift. Footnote: the Virtues of
Gas Guzzling first ran in the print edition of The Nation that
went to press last week.
ALEXANDER COCKBURN, JEFFREY ST CLAIR, BECKY GRANT AND THE INSTITUTE FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF JOURNALISTIC CLARITY, COUNTERPUNCH We published an article entitled "A Saudiless Arabia" by Wayne Madsen dated October 22, 2002 (the "Article"), on the website of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity, CounterPunch, www.counterpunch.org (the "Website"). Although it was not our intention, counsel for Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi has advised us the Article suggests, or could be read as suggesting, that Mr Al Amoudi has funded, supported, or is in some way associated with, the terrorist activities of Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda terrorist network. We do not have any evidence connecting Mr Al Amoudi with terrorism. As a result of an exchange of communications with Mr Al Amoudi's lawyers, we have removed the Article from the Website. We are pleased to clarify the position. August 17, 2005
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from CounterPunch Books! The Case Against Israel By Michael Neumann ![]() Grand Theft Pentagon: Tales of Greed and Profiteering in the War on Terror by Jeffrey St. Clair ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |