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Today's
Stories
March 23, 2004
Phillip Cryan
The Drug War's Next Casualty: Colombia's
National Parks
March 22, 2004
Mazin Qumsiyeh
On Extrajudicial
Executions
Uri Avnery
The
Assassination of Sheikh Yassin is Worse Than a Crime
Gilad Atzmon
Sharon's Rampage
Mike Whitney
Guilty Until Proven Innocent: the Story of Captain James Yee
Jason Leopold
Firm With Ties to Cheney Faces Criminal Indictment in Cal Energy
Scam
Greg Moses
Stop
Walling and Stalling: a Report from Houston's Peace March
Phil Gasper
San Francisco: 25,000 March for an End to the Occupation
Lenni Brenner
Report
from NYC: Old and Young Parade for Peace
Julian Borger
The Clarke Revelations
Steve Perry
Karl Rove's Moment
Website of the Day
Enviros Against War
March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
March 19, 2004
Jeffrey St. Clair
Zapatero
to Kerry: Back Off, Senator, Our Troops are Coming Home
Ann Harrison
So
Protesters, How Well Do You Know Your Rights?
William MacDougall
Fortress Britain's War on "Economic Migrants"
Greg Moses
Sold American: Cowboy Nation Gets Ready to Vote
Cynthia McKinney
Haiti and the Impotence of Black America: Roll Back This Coup,
Mr. Bush
Norman Solomon
Spinning the Past; Threatening the Future
John L. Hess
"Missing" Evidence and the NYTs
Vicente Navarro
The
End of Aznar, Bush's Best Friend
Website of the War
Naming the Dead
March 18, 2004
Gila Svirsky
Rachel
Corrie, One Year Later: She Never Lost Faith in Decency
Christopher Brauchli
Drilling a Hole in the Sanctions: How Halliburton Made $73 Million
from Saddam
William Kulin
Report from Iraq: Just Another Baghdad Car Bombing
Mike Whitney
Resistance: a Moral Imperative
Rep. Ron Paul
Broadcast Indecency Act: an Indecent Attack on the First Amendment
Josh Frank
The Nader Question
Jack Random
They Lied & They Lost: Madrid and the Lessons of Democracy
Greg Bates
What Makes a Nader Voter Tick? A Survey
Sam Hamod / Alfredo Reyes
Contempt of the World: Hastert, Bush and Cheney on Spain
Gary Leupp
The
Madrid Bombings: the Chickens Come Home to Roost
Website of the Day
Privatizing Armageddon: Buy Your Own Doomsday Key
March 17, 2004
Marjorie Cohn
Spain, the EU and the US: War on
Terror or Civil Liberties?
David MacMichael
Untruth
and Consequences
Michael Donnelly
Wear the Green, But Skip the Green Beer
Tom Stephens
"Steady Leadership": Let the Buyer Beware
Wayne Madsen
Sen. Kerry, Let Me Help You Out
Karyn Strickler
Who Owns the Sierra Club? Anonymous Donors and Rigged Elections
Peter Linebaugh
Bush:
Blanc Blanc
March 16, 2004
Lenni Brenner
James
Madison: the Anti-Clerical Father of the Bill of Rights
Scott Boehm
Madrid
Diary: How to Change World Order in Four Days
Alexander Lynch
From Franco to Aznar: the History
Behind the Spanish Elections
Sam Hamod and Alfredo
Reyes
The Truth About the Spanish Elections: Aznar Was Going Down Anyway
Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg
You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way:
Executing David Clayton Hill
Mike Whitney
The Case for a Nuclear Iran
Robert Fisk
The Bloody Price of the "War
on Terror"
Bill Christison
The
Aftershocks from Madrid
CounterPunch Photo Wire
The Passion of St. Teresa
Website of the Day
Join the War on Art!
March 15, 2004
Harry Browne
Terror Nothing New to Europe
Mike Whitney
Justice
Not Murder: the Tragic Symmetry of Terrorism
Lidice Valenzuela
Haiti: a Coup without Consultation
Greg Moses
Lessons
from the Texas Primaries: Looking for a Coalition with Legs
Mickey Z.
Depraved Indifference: C-Sections, Patriarchy & Women's Health
Asaf Shtull-Trauring
AWOL
in New York: From Refusenik to Organizer
CounterPunch Wire
Gen. Gramajo Executed by Bees!
March 12 / 14, 2004
Gabriel Kolko
The
Coming Elections and the Future of American Global Power
Saul Landau
Oh, Jesus...It's the Movie!
William Blum
Neo-Con(tradictions)
William S. Lind
Why They Throw Rocks
Rahul Mahajan
The Meaning of Madrid: War on "Terrorism" Makes Us
All Less Safe
Neve Gordon
Demographic Wars
Kurt Nimmo
Kerry and the Progressive Interventionists
Mickey Z.
The "New" UN Blames the Poor
Mike Whitney
War Games: the American Media Leads the Charge
Helen Scott and Ashley
Smith
Aristide's Fall: What Led to the Coup?
Justin E.H. Smith
Loïc Wacquant: Against a Sociodicy
of the American Prison
Brandy Baker
Him Again? Al Gore Needs to Move On
Robin Philpot
Nobody Can Call It a "Plane Crash" Now: the Report
on the Assassination of Rwandan President Habyarimana
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Meat Monopoly Takes a Rare Pounding
Dave Zirin
She Turned Her Back on the War: an Interview with Toni Smith
Daniel Wolff
The Lord's Pier
March 11, 2004
Ron Jacobs
Bedtime
for Democracy
Bill Kauffman
Hey,
Ralph! Why Not Another Party of the People?
James Hollander
Slaughter
in Madrid: Consolidating an Ally?
Norman Solomon
They
Shoot Journalists, Don't They?
Patrick Gavin
The Salvation of Dan Quayle: Family Values Return
Becky Burgwin
You're
Messing with the Wrong Generation
John Sugg
The FBI is on My Trail
March 10, 2004
Hammond Guthrie
Read
This Book!: "Who the Hell is Stew Albert?"
Chris Floyd
Operation Enduring Sweatshop: Another
Bush Brings Hell to Haiti
Elizabeth Corrie
Remembering the Death of Rachel Corrie
Mike Whitney
US Press Torpedoes Aristide
M. Junaid Alam
An Anti-Civilizational War?
Bob Feldman
The Occupation of Haiti: Recalling 1915-1934
John L. Hess
An Overload of Crises
Gary Leupp
On Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi and the Uses of al-Qaeda "Links"
March 9, 2004
Greg Weiher
The
Zarqawi Gambit, Part 2
Ben Tripp
Word Up! Let's Have a Conversation
Tom Barry
Neo-Cons Target Syria
Sharon Smith
The Hypocrites in the Catholic Church
Robert Fisk
The Same Old Iraq
Doug Giebel
The Bush Strategy: Laughing All the Way
Ralph Nader
Pension Rights, the Trail of Broken Promises
Daniel Estulin
In Memory of Ricardo Ortega: a Great Journalist, Killed in Haiti
Dave Lindorff
Martha Stewart's Cloudy Day
Saul Landau
Will the Filthy Rich Dump Bush?
Website of the Day
Imperial Armies in the Garden
March 8, 2004
Amy Goodman
An
Interview with Aristide
Eric Ruder
An Interview
with Robert Fatton on the Coup in Haiti
Robert Jensen
The Presidential Library Terrorist
Connection
Mike Whitney
Expel the US from the Security Council
Jason Leopold
How Cheney Helped Cover Up Pakistan's
Nuclear Proliferation
Mazin Qumsiyeh
Why is Apartheid Touted as a Solution?
Kevin Alexander Gray
The Legacy of Strom Thurmond
Derek Seidman
Radical Continuity: an Interview with Paul Buhle
Steve Perry
Kerry Fiddles While He Could be Burning Bush
Website of the Day
Patriot
Act Game
March 6 / 7, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Understanding the World with
Paul Sweezy
Robert Pollin
Remembering Paul Sweezy
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Politics of Timber Theft
Tom Reeves
Bush's Mass Deportations: 63,000 and Counting
Charles Lewis
Who Mugged Howard Dean in Iowa:
Kerry, Torricelli and a Mysterious Frontgroup
Tom Jackson
My Breakfast with Sen. Judd Gregg
Kurt Nimmo
Is Venezuela Next?
Alan Cisco
A Report from Caracas
Jack Random
Haitian Democracy be Damned
Colin Piquette
Oh, Canada: the Coup Coalition
Lee Sustar
Labor's State of Emergency
William D. Hartung
Iraq and the Costs of War
David Sally
Rebuilding
Amérique
Mark Scaramella
When God Mooned Moses: Test Your Bible Knowledge
Mickey Z.
What We Can Learn from Ashcroft's Gallbladder
Ron Jacobs
Politics and Baseball
Dave Zirin
The Longest Jump: the Blackballing of Phil Shinnick
Poets' Basement
John Holt and Larry Kearney
Website of the Weekend
National Day of Action for Rachel Corrie
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
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March
23, 2004
The Drug War's Next Casualty
Colombia's
National Parks
By PHILLIP CRYAN
Daniel Samper Pizano has turned his column in
the Bogota daily El Tiempo into a megaphone in recent weeks,
rallying the public against U.S.-backed herbicide spraying in
Colombia's 49 national parks. His writing led to a two-day deluge
of more than 1,100 angry messages on El Tiempo's Web site. It
sparked a March 18 protest in Bogota outside the agency that
oversees the parks. And it threatens to turn an upcoming Colombian
Senate debate on the spraying into another protest scene.
The parks fumigation, part of a futile
nationwide program to eradicate coca and opium poppy crops, was
approved by Colombia's National Council on Narcotics last June
and by the U.S. Congress in December. The spraying endangers
wildlife in the parks, which span 25 million pristine acres of
a country that leads the world in bird diversity, that's second
in plant and amphibian diversity, and that's third in reptile
diversity. The spraying also threatens cities that depend on
the protected areas for their water supplies. And it endangers
the health and the food crops of the 800,000 people who live
in the parks.
Samper, whose brother Ernesto served
as the nation's president from 1994 to 1998, first tackled the
issue in a February 25 column that criticized President Alvaro
Uribe Velez for folding the Environment Ministry into a new Ministry
of Environment, Housing and Land Development and for appointing
Sandra Suarez Perez to lead this "bureaucratic stew."
Until November, Samper noted, Suarez directed Plan Colombia,
the U.S.-funded antidrug program that sprays hundreds of thousands
of Colombian acres a year.
In a second column, published March 3
under the headline "How to Stop the Park-icide," Samper
turned up the volume. "It's not enough to get indignant
about the fumigations," he wrote. "Something must be
done." He asked readers to attend the Colombian Senate's
planned March 30 debate on the spraying. And he urged them to
flood Uribe, Suarez and human rights ombudsperson Volmar Perez
Ortiz with protest letters and to send copies to an organization
opposing the sprayings internationally, the Interamerican
Association for Environmental Defense.
Samper's decision to offer how-to suggestions
for political activism appears to have come in response to reader
outcry after the February 25 column was published. In the March
3 piece, he quotes a message he received from one reader, Emilio
Edilberto Guerrero: "We need someone to lead a national
and international crusade, to mobilize the country. I'll offer
some hours of work... For anything I can do, I'm there."
Samper's third column on the topic, published
March 9, attacked the three public officials for ignoring public
outcry.
The columns apparently emboldened El
Tiempo itself to take a stand. A March 13 house editorial departed
from the paper's longtime advocacy for U.S. military aid and
collaboration between Washington and Bogota: "To not fumigate
the national parks would be, for one honorable time, to put the
national interest of a country with the second greatest environmental
wealth on the planet before the interest of the United States."
And, two days later, the newspaper requested
the Web site comments. By March 17, at least 1,167 had arrived,
nearly all criticizing the spraying. "We can't confront
the barbarous deforestation involved in drug trafficking with
barbarous fumigation by the government," Luis Felipe Ibarra
Tamayo of Medellin wrote. "No arguments are needed beyond
those of reality: You just have to see the effects. We've got
to wake up!"
Juan Jose Lopez, a Colombian living abroad,
took the sentiment further: "Why don't we fumigate the brains,
if they have them, of people who would even consider destroying
the biodiversity in our parks?"
Many described the sprayings as an imposition
of U.S. interests over Colombia's integrity and the world's ecological
health. "Please, no more sacrifices and self-inflicted wounds
for a [drug war] that has only brought us death, poverty and
divisions," Maria Elena Ramos of Cali wrote. "Our government's
mission_let no one forget it_is to defend NATIONAL interests!"
The comments also raised points omitted
from Samper's columns. The parks fumigation order, for example,
came from former Col. Alfonso Plazas Vega, head of the narcotics
council. Plazas helped plan and carry out the 1985 bombing of
Colombia's Palace of Justice, occupied by members of a guerrilla
group called M-19. The bombing killed at least 76 civilians,
including the country's 11 Supreme Court justices. Plazas also
helped form Death to Kidnappers (MAS), a forebear of the United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), the country's main paramilitary
federation today. Human rights organizations blocked attempts
by the Colombian government to appoint Plazas Consul to Hamburg,
Germany and later San Francisco, California during the 1990s.
El Tiempo's March 13 editorial described
fumigation as "the worst possible way to win the 'hearts
and minds' of a people." Indeed: after heavy sprayings over
the last two years destroyed their food crops and income, many
young men in the southern province of Putumayo enlisted with
the country's guerrilla and paramilitary groups. In terms of
maximal alienation of the civilian population, it's hard to rival
the fumigations program - but the Palace of Justice massacre
just might qualify. Having Plazas announce the extension of sprayings
to national parks added many-layered insult to the colossal,
obvious injury.
And Samper isn't the only public figure
speaking against the parks fumigation. Alfredo Molano Bravo,
a columnist of the Bogota weekly El Espectador, asked in a December
column what would happen if George W. Bush ordered herbicides
dumped on the "pine forests and 2,000 year old Sequoias"
of Yosemite National Park, where marijuana crops are grown. "The
protests against such measures would be gigantic," he wrote.
Other foes of the spraying of parks include
former health minister Camilo Gonzalez Posso and former environmental
ministers Juan Mayr Maldonado and Ernesto Guhl Nanneti. Former
human rights ombudsperson Eduardo Cifuentes Munoz repeatedly
urged suspension of fumigation anywhere in the country.
But Samper deserves credit for the current
groundswell. If journalists rallied the public against war and
impoverishment with the same conviction Samper has confronted
environmental destruction, things might start looking up in Colombia.
Phillip Cryan
is a writer and activist who returned to the United States in
November after 18 months of human rights work in Colombia. A
shorter version of this piece appeared in his biweekly Colombia
Week column on media coverage of the country's conflict.
He lives in Ames, Iowa. He can be reached at: phillipcryan000@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for March 20 / 21, 2004
Alexander Cockburn
Gay
Marriage: Sidestep on Freedom's Path
Jeffrey St. Clair
Intolerable Opinions in an Age of Shock and Awe: What Would Lilburne
Do?
Ted Honderich
Tony Blair's Moral Responsibility for Atrocities
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
The Plot Against Syria: an Irresponsibility Act
Gary Leupp
On Viewing "The Passion of the Christ"
William A. Cook
Fence, Barrier, Wall
Phil Gasper
Bush v. Bush-lite: Chomsky's Lesser Evilism
Ron Jacobs
Fox News and the Masters of War
John Stanton
Which Way John Kerry? The Senator's Inner Nixon
Justin Felux
Kerry and Black America: Just Another Stupid White Man
Mike Whitney
Greenspan's Treason: Swindling Posterity
Augustin Velloso
Avoiding Osama's Abyss
Lawrence Magnuson
Eyes Wide Open: Is Spain Caving in to Terrorism?
Kathy Kelly
Getting Together to Defeat Terrorism
Tracy McLellan
Scalia & Cheney: Happiness is a Warm Gun
Kurt Nimmo
Emma Goldman for President!
Luis J. Rodriguez
The Redemptive Power of Art: It's Not a Frill
Mickey Z
The Michael Moore Diet
Jackie Corr
When Harry Truman Stopped in Butte
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
The Great Trial of 1922: Gandhi's Vision of Responsibility
Poets' Basement
Stew Albert & JD Curtis
Website of the Weekend
Virtual World Election
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