|
CounterPunch
January
6, 2003
The
American Psyche after 9/11
Death's Dream Kingdom
By WALTER A. DAVIS
"Those who do not understand
the past are condemned to repeat it."
George Santayana
"A screaming comes across the sky."
Thomas Pynchon
"every image of the past that is
not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens
to disappear irretrievably."
Walter Benjamin
Gandhi, on a hunger strike to protest fighting
between Hindu and Muslim after the Partition is confronted by
a man in agony. " I am going to hell. I killed an innocent
child. My son was slain and in my rage I killed a Muslim child.
And so I am going to hell." Gandhi's reply: " I know
a way out of hell. Go, find a homeless Muslim child, adopt him
and raise him as your own. But raise him in the Muslim religion."
Gandhi knew a way out of hell. I think I know a way in-and why
it is the route we must follow in addressing 9-11.
Trauma
Trauma occurs when something happens
that shatters the ego and its defenses. An event persists as
an image that awakens other images buried in the psyche, images
bound to repressed memories that bring with their return an anxiety
that threatens psychic dissolution. The hidden, buried history
of one's life presents itself as an awareness one can no longer
escape, a self-knowledge one must now construct since that act
is the only route to "recovery."
Can what is true for individuals also
be true for nations? And thus with respect to 9-11: our task
being not to resolve the trauma but to do all in our power to
assure that it is fully constituted? But for that to happen it
is not enough to cite the traumatic images that were blazed into
the nation's consciousness that day: a plane embedded surrealistically
in a building; bodies falling from the sky; that great granite
elevator going down; the terrible black cloud rushing forth to
engulf a fleeing multitude; and then the countless dead, buried
alive, passing in endless queue across the shattered landscape
of the nation's consciousness. Nor is it enough to note the precise
correspondence of these images to the anxieties that define the
psychotic register of the psyche: falling endlessly, going to
pieces, collapsing in on oneself, losing all orientation, delivered
over to a claustrophobic world of inescapable, ceaseless suffering
(Winnicott, 1965). Something more is needed for an event to create
trauma in the collective psyche. Images from the present must
speak to other images that are tied to memories buried deep in
the national psyche; to things forgotten, ungrieved, vigorously
denied; things in the past that have never been confronted and
worked through. Such as this: on 9-11 did many Americans realize,
if only for a moment, that we were now experiencing, in diminished
form, what it was like to be in Hiroshima city on 8-6-45 when
in an instant an entire city disappeared, no where to run from
the flash that vaporized over 200,000 souls and condemned the
survivors, the walking dead to a condition of nameless dread,
to wandering directionless in a landscape become nightmare?
Ground Zero
As Image
What's in a name? Ground-zero, the term
now used to designate the rubble of what was once the World Trade
Center was the term coined in Alamogordo, New Mexico to identify
the epicenter where the first Atomic Bomb was detonated. It was
then used to locate the same place in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
so that we could measure with precision the force of the Bomb
and gauge its effects.
Image is the native language of anxiety,
the language psyche uses in an effort to mediate the emotional
and psychological impact of events. (1) As such a language
of images has much in common with the logic of the dream, a logic
of hidden and unexpected connections, of abrupt shifts and apparent
discontinuities as image succeeds image in the agon of a psyche
seeking a concrete way to embody and mediate its pain. In image
we find a mode of cognition that is prior to the conceptual order,
with a revelatory power beyond the concept's range of disclosure
(Heidegger, 1927). To apprehend what image reveals requires for
that reason a method equal in engagement. Rather than address
9-11 from some objective stance above the rubble, secure in the
a priori psychoanalytic knowledge that enables us to dispense
healing insights to an anguished nation, we must find a way to
get inside the event, to find in the image, as Eliot did in The
Waste Land, "fragments shored against " our
"ruins," that beckon to a historical consciousness
that will come only if we follow the path Walter Benjamin outlined
for the dialectical historian (Benjamin, 1924): to arrest images
that flare up at a moment of crisis and attempt to internalize
and articulate their significance before they disappear, perhaps
irretrievably, in the predictable rush toward ideological reaffirmations--
and national healing. (2)
Mourning
And so, we return to ground-zero
and two possibilities-one idealistic, the other ratified by events.
The idealistic possibility: Hiroshima, unfinished business
deep in the America psyche, returned on 9-11 to trouble us with
afterthought and forethought? A mourning process long deferred
would then have commenced and with it the recognition that guilt
is not a psychological condition to be avoided at all costs but
the primary source of knowledge and inner transformation. Internalizing
that possibility we would have found what may be the true origin
of ethics: the ability to realize what we have done to others
when we see our deeds done to us. Ground-zero would then signify
our transformation from subjects bent on rectitude and revenge
to ones capable of reflection and restraint.; capable of pursuing
justice through international law, through the presentation of
carefully gathered evidence to the United Nations and the World
Court. We would have attained a recognition of the duties of
world citizenship and thereby a way of honoring the innocent
victims of terror with a fitting memorial.
A Historical
Foray
But of course none of this happened.
Nor could it. And the suggestion raises strong objections, even
outrage because we have learned to recite, by rote, what has
now become a national article of faith: that the bombings of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified, almost idealistic acts,
undertaken with reluctance, as "the least abhorrent choice"
but finally the only way to end the war thereby saving perhaps
a million lives. This explanation was first articulated in an
article ghost-written for Secretary of State Henry Stimson by
his aide McGeorge Bundy (Stimson and Bundy, 1947). It is a pretty
story, the only problem being Bundy's admission in a book published
shortly before his death (Bundy, 1990), that the entire thing
was a fabrication, a deliberate myth, carefully constructed after
the fact (3) to disguise the actual reasons why we dropped
the bomb: (1)to avenge Pearl Harbor, (2) to justify the amount
of money spent developing the bomb, (3) to create laboratories
so that our scientific, medical, and military personnel could
study the affects of the bomb, and (4) to impress the Russians
and the rest of the world with this opening salvo in the Cold
War. (4) The act, moreover, abrogated all distinctions
between combatant and non-combatant, the object of military action
now being an entire city, of no military significance, its inhabitants
indifferently identified as a single mass delivered to death
in an effort , as General Leslie Groves put it, "to inflict
the maximum moral and psychological damage on the enemy"
(Rhodes, 1986). (5) Hiroshima was the first act of global
terrorism, the harbinger of acts that would derive their rebarbative
logic from the finality with which 8-6-45 consigned "humanistic"
considerations to the dustbin of history.
Evacuation
And that is but the beginning. For the
motives Bundy acknowledges drew their power from deeper psychological
forces, forces evident once again in the way the term ground-zero
was actually deployed in the days following 9-11. Calling upon
a primary mechanism of projection and denial --reversal of meaning--
ground-zero gave us a way to identify ourselves as the innocent
victims of a terror that we claim is unprecedented-and that we
demand the whole world acknowledge as such. From which follows,
of necessity, the parade of heroic images whereby we rise phoenix-like
from the ashes, united as a nation that has recovered its essence
and thus goes forth to reaffirm the ideals it represents by undertaking
the deeds needed to cleanse the world of yet another evil. John
Wayne lives. The projector has started running and on the screen
of the national psyche we get another movie full of patriotic
sentiment and patriotic gore. Flags a-burstin the heroic dead
of 9-11 are resurrected in the acts of war we undertake in their
name, their image blending and fading into the images of our
triumphant military action in Afghanistan or any other place
we designate as a haven of "terrorism." America has
once again found a way to view history as the inevitable progress
of an a-historical Essence, a way to exploit a traumatic event
in order to assure a reassertion of the ideological guarantees
that make it impossible for us to learn from history. On a psychological
level we have attained an even greater boon: the evacuation of
all inner conflict through projective identification, a projective
identification that is unlimited in its scope, that can find
new objects any time it needs them.
The Psyche
That Dropped the Bomb
The Bomb provided the template for that transformation because
the psyche found in it the possibility of an unprecedented, radical
self-mediation: the chance to take the anxieties that define
the psyche and resolve them at what I term the sublime register.
(6) This is the register that operates whenever the psyche
seeks a way to turn a situation of abject weakness into a confirmation
of omnipotent power (Kant, 1793). In Alamogordo the human mind
ascended to a condition it had long dreamed of: nature's secrets
and her might were now harnessed to our will. Mind had finally
triumphed over the otherness of nature. Nature's power, unleased
as never before, confirmed our power to overcome all inner limitations.
The sequel thus beckoned. For if we found ourselves abject objects
of the other's wrath at Pearl Harbor we now had a way to bring
about a complete and lasting transformation of that situation.
Projective identification finds in the Bomb a way to take everything
weak and vulnerable in oneself and invest it in an other who
is reduced to an object of contempt and obliteration. The resulting
mania banishes any threat of a return of depressive anxieties.
In the Bomb the manic triad-triumph, contempt, and dismissal
(Klein, 1957)- celebrates its Sabbath. Metapsychologically, the
transformation is complete and can be schematized thus: abjection
reversed; blockage overcome; aggression unbound. Narcissistic
grandiosity thereby finds the fullest possible expansion; the
perfect phallic mirror in the mushroom cloud rising above the
spectacle as proof of the Bomb's power to compel submission to
its will. Evacuation attains an exorcism of an unprecedented
order-a psychotic attack on linking (Bion 1959) that is totalizing
in its scope and that scoffs at all humanistic considerations.
Thanatos in the bomb achieves the condition Freud feared: a condition
in which death has been fully eroticized. Pleasure-or jouissance-under
the Bomb equals releasing a destructiveness that voids all inner
tensions in an aggression that has the blessing of the super-ego,
an aggression that feels righteous. As confirmation consider
this, but one example among many: Navy Day, October, 1945, a
crowd of 120,000 gather in the Los Angeles Coliseum to celebrate
a simulated reenactment of the Bombing of Hiroshima, complete
with a mushroom cloud that rises from the fifty yard line to
the joyful cheers of that rapt throng (Boyer, 1985). The first
Super-Bowl. The society of the spectacle (Debord,1994) here announces
its truth as a mass audience cums to the ritual that confers
on it a lasting, ghostly identity: the howl of joy that rises
as a hymn of praise to the burgeoning cloud is the new American
collectivity in Hosanna before the image of its inhumanity as
it blossoms before them, big with the future.
A History
Lesson
From which follows a quick tour of the
underside of American history from 1945 to the present. The debacle
of Vietnam. The error: the image came home to roost. With the
evening news America each night supped full with horror. The
lesson: no more images. The solution: Iraq, the Nintendo war,
a war represented on TV as a video game. No images of the 100,000
Iraqui dead entered the American conscience to trouble our sleep.
Instead, with victory the proclamation of George H. Bush : "We've
finally put an end to Vietnam syndrome." The lesson of history
learned the son now deploys it globally in a war where, he informs
us, much will happen that we will never get to hear about or
see. Extremes meet: the image is banished but the promise of
global action is affirmed. George W. Bush is an apt pupil. He
knows that in order to resolve the trauma of 9-11 he must satisfy
an outraged public by finding a way to repeat the psychological
operations perfected in Hiroshima. He knows that nothing less
than a global war against "terrorism" will suffice.
But he also knows that the pleasure of the image must be replaced
by another kind of satisfaction, one appropriate to the information
age, an age in which pleasure has itself become virtual. Subjects
formed by what is today perhaps the primary relationship, the
relationship to the computer, dance to the subtext, heeding the
command to enjoy our symptom (Zizek,1989). For it is now possible
to imagine and experience scorched-earths as so many blips on
a computer screen with disavowal already in place and pleasure
assured in a jouissance that is one with Thanatos: the
reduction of the human to the statistical and the boundless power
one feels in manipulating, at the speed of light, a world so
rendered into one's hands. The society of the spectacle-a society
that needed Hiroshima and Navy Day in the L.A. Coliseum-is replaced
by the society of the virtual. The post-modern subject has entered
a condition of bliss, the hegemony of Thanatos assured by the
sacrifice of the image. Mass carnage grows apace: over a million
Iraqui civilians have now died as a result of our sanctions;
more civilians ("collateral damage") have now died
in Afghanistan as a result of our bombings than perished at the
WTC. But the knowledge of these things has become virtual, disembodied,
imageless and thus is already fading, leaving no residue in the
national consciousness.
After Such
Knowledge, What Forgiveness?
What, then, are the possibilities of
healing and renewal that we can derive from an awareness of the
tragic complexities of 9-11 and its aftermath? A responsible
reply must begin with the recognition that it was through us
that terror on a global scale first came into the world; and
that we remain its primary global practitioner. For an internalization
of that fact delivers a death-blow to the belief that "catharsis"
and "renewal" require the reassertion of adolescent
myths about ourselves and our place in history. Historical memory
must become instead the process of creating a tragic culture:
one for whom memory is conscience and not hagiography; one for
whom the past weighs like a nightmare precisely because it has
not been constituted. That is the true meaning of Hiroshima.
Ground-zero haunts us not because we feel guilt about it but
because we don't. Which is why, whenever we are traumatized,
we repeat the psychological operations we perfected in Hiroshima
in a progressive self-reification that we remain powerless to
reverse as long as we refuse to internalize what actually happened
on 8-6-45. But to do that we must begin the long, hard task of
rooting out everything in our culture that weds us to "the
psyche that dropped the bomb." Such an effort requires,
moreover, that we free ourselves from our own liberal, "mental
health" myth: the belief, articulated by Lifton (Lifton
and Mitchell, 1995) that admitting error assures renewal through
the power of the American "protean self" to reclaim
the ideals that make American history the story of inevitable
progress. What Hiroshima teaches us, on the contrary, is that
history remains irreversible in its tragic consequences until
we find our own equivalent of Gandhi's ethic: that the way out
of hell is one that sustains trauma and depressive mourning as
the destiny of historical subjects who know that reversal begins
only when we are willing to plumb the depths of our collective
disorder. A tragic understanding of history assures us no catharsis,
no renewal, no guarantees. What it offers instead is the realization
that to sustain and deepen the trauma is our only hope. (7)
For the alternative is truly horrifying:
"the Bush doctrine" a blank check for whatever carnage
will be needed to satisfy our blood-lust and to preserve our
"right" to ravage the planet's resources. Because one
fact above all others is, as Marx would say, "determinative
in the last instance" of what is going on in the world today.
5% of the world's population consume 25% of its resources-and
they do so by exerting control over the destiny of other countries.
Bin Laden is a symptom, a nostalgic religious fanatic, but his
fanaticism derives from a condition that is actual. In Rio de
Janeiro, at the one ecological conference he attended, George
H. Bush delivered a proclamation even more chilling than his
crowing about Vietnam syndrome: "The American way of life
is not negotiable." As long as that dogma remains in place
there will be many more ground-zeroes.
Walter A. Davis
is professor emeritus of English at Ohio State University. He
is the author of Deracination:
Historiocity, Hiroshima and the Tragic Imperative. He
can be reached at: davis.65@osu.edu.
ENDNOTES
1. For the dialectical development of
such a theory of the image, see Chapter Six in Walter A. Davis
Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative
(New York: SUNY P, 2001). This theory derives from the pioneering
work of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin on the interpretation
of culture through the focus on what both thinkers term the dialectical
image, i.e., those images in which the contradictions of a historical
period or moment are revealed in depth. Constructing a method
that enables us to decipher such images is the burden of Chapter
Six of Deracination. The present essay provides a concrete
historical illustration of that method.
2. The kind of moral/political extension
of psychoanalysis undertaken in this essay stands in a long tradition,
first charted by Freud in a series of unsettling examinations
of European society and culture during and after the period of
the first World War. Walter Benjamin and the members of the Frankfurt
school (specifically Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse) extended
this tradition into a full-scale examination and critique of
capitalist ideologies. The moral/political extension of psychoanalysis
is thereby simultaneous with exposing the social and ideological
assumptions that are in play whenever psychoanalysis makes adaptation
to normalcy and the reinforcement of the ego its goal. Few complain,
of course, when the moral/political dimension of psychoanalysis
is extended in the opposite direction, i.e., when psychoanalysis
is used to lend support to dominant institutions, beliefs, and
norms, as in the work of Hartmann, Fromm, Erickson, Fairbairn,
and Kohut. For an incisive critique of the ideology behind such
efforts, see Russell Jacoby's, Social Amnesia (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1975). In recovering the critical power of psychoanalysis
mention should also be made here of the Lacanian application
of psychoanalysis to the critique of dominant ideologies developed
by Slavoj Zizek and his circle. See especially Slavoj Zizek,
The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989).
Psychoanalysis and political analysis supplement one another
in the method I have constructed for the interpretation of cultural
phenomena. (See Inwardness and Existence: Subjectivity In/And
Hegel, Heidegger, Marx, and Freud [Madison: U of Wisconsin
P: 1989]; Get the Guests: Psychoanalysis, Modern American
Drama and the Audience [Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1994];
and Deracination. Following this method, political analysis
is applied to overt ideologies; psychoanalysis is applied to
the images and historical acts that reveal what those ideologies
conceal. In the present essay my focus is on the latter because
my effort is to illustrate how psychoanalysis could make its
unique contribution to a larger analysis of the current state
of American political and social culture.
3. McGeorge Bundy's Danger and Survival:
Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (New York:
Knopf, 1992) is pivotal in the scholarship on Hiroshima because
the very architect of one side of the debate that has lasted
for over fifty years admits the falsehood of his position. People
will, of course, continue to believe that Hiroshima was justified-because
they want to believe it-- and to think that grounds still exist
for a genuine difference of opinion on the topic. Thanks to Bundy's
admission the truth is now known beyond a reasonable doubt for
all who have done the requisite reading on the topic.
4. In establishing these as the four
reasons for the bombing of Hiroshima, pride of place among historians
goes to the seminal work by Gar Alperovitz, The Decision To
Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth
(New York: Knopf, 1995). The book includes an extensive bibliography
of the numerous historical authorities who have contributed to
the position Alperovitz presents.
5. One dominant theme in Richard Rhodes
massive historical study The Making of the Atomic Bomb
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) is the tracing of the erosion
of the protections accorded non-combatants in the development
of modern warfare from World War I through Dresden
to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Rhodes shows that there is
continuity and difference in the sequence of events that led
to the qualitatively new event that happened on August 6 and
9, 1945. But this does not mean, as is so often argued, that
the horrors of Dresden can be used to justify Hiroshima or to
deflect attention from its unique status as the first act of
global terrorism. Moreover, there is another reason why Hiroshima
is worthy of our special attention. It is ours. We did it this
time. It is thus the event uniquely able to help us identify
and experience our moral situatedness in history.
6. This section of the essay summarizes
the argument constructed at length in Chapters Three and Four
of Deracination. Chapter Three considers the Bomb in terms
of the aesthetics of the sublime. Chapter Four considers it in
terms of thanatos. The information on the Navy Day celebration
at the Los Angeles Coliseum comes from Paul Boyer's study of
the Bomb in American culture, By the Bomb's Early Light (New
York: Pantheon, 1985).
7. Robert Jay Lifton's work, especially
his book with Greg Mitchell, Hiroshima in America: A Half
Century of Denial (New York: Putnam, 1995) is doubly significant
in this context. Few are as aware as Lifton of the traumatic
realities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and no one has done as much
to bring them to our attention. Unfortunately, Lifton's work
also provides a striking example of the reassurances that ego
psychology offers us of recovery from trauma followed by renewal.
The standard presentation of the theory of trauma developed by
ego psychology is offered in Judith Herman's Trauma and Recovery
(New York: Basic Books, 1992). This theory of trauma is,
I think, a quintessentially American response to the traumatic,
one that superimposes our most cherished beliefs about ourselves
and our unique place in history upon traumatic realities in order
to deprive them of their force and their potential significance.
My effort, in contrast, is to liberate the tragic and constitute
its immanent dialectic by engaging trauma without superimposing
any guarantees upon that process.
REFERENCES
Alperovitz, Gar. The Decision to Use
the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth. New
York: Knopf, 1985.
Benjamin, Walter. (1924). Theses On the
Philosophy of History. In Illuminations. Translated by
Hannah Arendt. New York: Basic Books, 1978. .
Bion,W.R. (1959). Attacks on linking.
International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 40: 308-315.
Boyer, Paul. By the Bomb's Early Light.
New York: Pantheon, 1985.
Bundy, McGeorge. (1990). Danger and
Survival: Choices about the Bomb in the First Fifty Years.
New York: Vintage Books.
Debord, Guy. (1980). The Society of
the Spectacle. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New
York: Zone Books.
Heidegger, Martin. (1927). Being and
Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and William Richardson.
New York: Basic Books,1962.
Kant, Immanuel. (1793). Critique of
Judgment. Translated by J.H. Bernard. New York: Hafner, 1951.
Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude.
New York: Basic Books, 1957.
Lifton, Robert Jay and Mitchell, Greg.
(1995). Hiroshima in America: A Half Century of Denial.
New York, Putnam.
Rhodes, Richard. (1986). The Making
of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Sherwin, Martin J. A World Destroyed:
Hiroshima and the Origins of the Arms Race. (New York, Knopf,
1975.)
Stimson, Henry (and Bundy, McGeorge).
(1947). The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb. Harper, February,
1947.
Wyden, Peter. Day One: Before Hiroshima
and After. New York: Warner, 1984.
Winnicott, D.W. (1965). The Psychology
of Madness. In Psychoanalytic Explorations. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.
Zizek, Slavoj. (1989). The Sublime
Object of Ideology. New York: Verso.
*Note: The first three words in the title
of my essay are taken from T.S. Eliot's poem The Hollow Men.
The sub-title for the last section of my essay is taken from
T.S. Eliot's poem Gerontion.
Yesterday's
Features
Jeffrey St. Clair
Something
About Butte
Saul Landau
The Bush Vision and the Culture of Power
Annie Higgins
Six Soldiers
Michael Ortiz Hill
Bush's Armageddon Obsession
Francisco Armada and Carlos Mutaner
Venezuela: Chomsky's Tropical Nightmare
James T. Phillips
Targeting Americans
Jack Bice
A Fresh World Vision
Robert Fisk
Double Standards in the War on Terror
Chris Clarke
Is a Blue Rose a Rose?
Frank Fugate
How the West (Bank) Was Won
Anis Shivani
Bleak Prospects for Dems
Ben Tripp
Does Bush Know Korean?
Adam Engel
Les Miserable and the Hackers from Hell
Keep CounterPunch Alive:
Make
a Tax-Deductible Donation Today Online!
CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- CounterPunch Special:
The Persecution of Gershon Legman by Susan Davis: Smut, the Post Office, Commies
and the FBI;
- Reeling Democrats: Is Pelosi the Answer?
- Gandhi v. Hitler: the Secret Race for the Nobel
Prize;
- Sullying Mario Savio's
Memory;
- Lynching Then and Now;
- Earn While You Learn: Chris Whittle and Child Labor;
The Case of the Pompous
Professor;
- The Class Struggle in
Boston: All that
Effort, But What Did They Get?
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
December 24,
2002
Joanne Mariner
Refusing
to Fight in Israel
Jeffrey St.
Clair
The Drug
War According to Dr. Mengele: Agent Green Over the Andes
Gavin Martin
Joe Strummer
is Dead: Long Live the Clash!
Daniel Wolff
From Gospel to the Birth of Soul: Sam
Cooke & the Soul Stirrers
David Vest
Stirred and Shaken
Ben Tripp
Yuletide
Saul Landau
The Quiet American Returns
Michael Wolff
X-mas in Zone One
Kevin Begley
Nestlé and a Nation in Famine
Francis Boyle
O Little Town of Bethlehem
Linda Heard
Where are the Wise Men?
Philip Farruggio
On the First Day of X-mas
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|